JULY 30 / Egg(ing) on the Chronicle's face

THE CHRONICLE rightly took on the birthers today, but, as usual, the editors' understanding of conservative thinkers is like one of those maps on the frontispiece of a science fiction novel: an imaginary land. Said the Chronicle:

The more vocal birthers have been egged on by Rush Limbaugh and other stalwarts of the right.

(Editorial, "Birth wrongs," Houston Chronicle, July 30, 2009)

Some other "stalwarts of the right" may be pushing this nonsense, though it would be considerably more fun if the Chronicle had bothered to mention their names rather than delivering up a broadbrush slur.

But Mr. Limbaugh?

I listen to the guy most all the time, and I don't feel even the least bit egged on. He has joked about the missing birth certificate, but nothing more that I've heard. The joke, by the way, went something like this:

Barack Obama has one thing in common with God. God doesn't have a birth certificate either.

That's technically inaccurate, of course, because President Obama apparently does have a birth certificate -- one the press is notoriously not permitted to see. Which is why Mr. Limbaugh ended his joke with this: "Not that we've seen."

What Mr. Limbaugh was egging on here was healthy mockery of the messianism displayed by, say, Oprah Winfrey ("the One we've been waiting for") and, say, Evan Thomas ("sort of God"). And the secretiveness of the president on what should be a mundane matter, a secretiveness the Chronicle implicitly endorses.  

The joke was crude. It was rude. It was not that funny.

But egging on? C'mon. We have a president who regards his original birth certificate (along with his college records) as a state secret. Isn't that at least a bit funny? Must we pretend otherwise because a few paranoid folks build a larger conspiracy theory on that fact -- fact, dear journalists -- than that fact could bear?  

So what's the Chronicle know that I don't?

I suspect the editors just made it up because, you know, Mr. Limbaugh, the stalwartist stalwart of the right, is well-known to be an evil man. Therefore it must be true that he's an egger-on of rightwing nuts.  

UPDATE: Thanks for the link from blogHouston.   

Comments

[Ted]

The timelines, places, actions, and motives, when analyzed, support, and are consistent with, this answer to the Obama birth puzzle:

Obama’s grandmother is his mother and his mother is his sister.

Think about it. Review all the facts and claims.

UNCA D: Let's call this the Eric Clapton and Bobby Darin Theory of Obamagenesis. And let's also call it -- how do I say this in a nice way? -- highly susceptible to being sliced and diced by Occam's Razor.

[Rorschach]

Ordinarily I'd be loth to accuse anyone of committing fraud to claim eligibility to be president. It has never happened before. I would add, even back when it was routine for people not to have birth certificates because they were born at home without a doctor in attendance, nobody ever accused anyone of falsifying that. But I am not so sanguine about this instance. All Obama would have had to do to defuse this was to release the long-form birth certificate. Instead, he spent a lot of taxpayer money to make sure it never was seen. Those are the actions of a guilty man.

That is like a kid taking off and running at the first sight of a cop. Of course the cop is going to chase him, just on general principles. If he weren't guilty of something, why did he run? If he didn't have anything to hide, why did he go out of his way to hide it?