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John Batchelor: Paranoids Ate My Party (Compares "Birthers" to Klan, Communists and Whigs)
The Daily Beast ^ | July 28, 2009 | John Batchelor

Posted on 07/28/2009 10:20:47 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet

The GOP, reduced to hosting loonies who obsess over Obama’s birthplace, is slipping into the ash heap. The Daily Beast’s John Batchelor on why Republican incoherence may doom the party to the fate of the Whigs.

The romantic yarn that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not in the United States, and is therefore an illegitimate POTUS is the core of a still-evolving conspiracy theory that now explodes like a neutron stink bomb splashing on the right wing while leaving the center and left idly smiling and curious.

What is going on with the despondent Republican Party that it hosts loonies called the birthers in its ranks?

The answer may be that the birther phenomenon is a mutation of a political virus called incoherence. Incoherence is fatal. It killed the Whigs (and led to the creation of the Republicans); it killed the Klan and the American communists. The birther mutation looks to erase what remains of the GOP’s credibility with the electorate, already at an all-time low and still sinking to third- and fourth-party numbers, if there were a third or a fourth party.

In sudden alarm Monday night, 158 House Republicans voted with the Democrats to endorse the self-evident fact that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. No whipping by the GOP leadership was necessary. The House Republicans understood that birtherism has jumped to a pandemic Phase 6, multiple infections in all states, much too late to stop with a quarantine on the Hill.

Already, a handful of House Republican members show signs of succumbing to the symptoms of brain fever—wagging fingers, dry-mouth stammering—by co-sponsoring a bill to require presidential candidates to submit a birth certificate. The primary patient is California Republican John Campbell, who showed tertiary impatience with his triteness on TV when he proposed, “It doesn’t matter if I have doubts or not, OK?”

August recess means that the Hill Republicans must go home to their districts to face the birtherite pod people, and there will be additional farcical confrontations similar to what the chump moderate Republican Rep. Mike Castle faced recently at a town-hall meeting in Delaware, when birthers flourished their birth certificates at him.

The pandemic is out of control, and those who argue cynically that birtherism is being stoked by the media, or fed by the cunning White House political operation to gain sympathy for a panicky presidency, are not examining the peculiar details of the potency of the illness.

This is not a pandemic that spreads only by the airplane, the Internet, or even by word of mouth, because a single exposure to the central whopper is not usually sufficient. Daily reinfection is needed or the disease goes dormant like algebra. Birtherism has found a durable vector, ubiquitous like insects and slippery like long-tailed mammals, in the institution of talk radio and its cable-TV compadre. The boss vectors just now are the burlesque artist Rush Limbaugh—“Barack Obama has yet to prove he’s a citizen”—and Limbaugh’s parasitic rival of bloviation, faux rueful Lou Dobbs: “I don’t know what the reality is. No one does.”

What is also striking about this mutation is that, as a talking vector, you do not need to endorse the birther template that the president was born of an 18-year-old girl who raced to Mombasa in time to deliver in an unnamed setting. You are just as effective a vector if you deny the birtherite creativity, if you produce the Hawaii documents, if you say the magic words “smear” or “tin-foil.”

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is a fertile source when he uses the briefing room to evince exasperation: “…this question in many ways continues to astound me.” Cable-TV stars such as the giddy Chris Matthews—“The birthers don’t let the facts get in the way”—and the stern Bill O’Reilly—“The Factor investigated it and found out that it’s bogus …”—become like Typhoid Marys, spreading an illness to which they claim immunity. Ratings, anyone?

Grimly, the birther episode is not a media story, or even a story about Barack Obama’s unique youth, but rather it is another illustration of the slow-motion decomposition of the GOP. The party, having lost its principles, its confidence, its courage, and then having lost an election, now experiences what it is to lose its mind, too, while it slips into the ash heap with other novelties.

The conduct of the Republicans in Congress since January has been astonishingly frail, as if the party had lost immunities to race-baiters like Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, to liars like John Ensign and Mark Sanford, to yammerers like Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann, to the goofily vain like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee.

The party has wasted away to the point where opportunistic eruptions like the birthers and much worse are natural sorrows. Republican incoherence didn’t begin with Mombasa. There is logic to the closing down of a great political party that has abandoned its own greatness to cheer on churls. Perhaps what appears terminal cowardice is only venality; perhaps what sounds like a death rattle is only the wrinkled ranting of crones in the Senate; perhaps the polls showing the Republican brand not as well regarded as Drano are just outliers. Perhaps, too, like miscreant HAL 9000, the GOP is warming up to sing, “Daisy, Daisy.”

*******

John Batchelor is radio host of the John Batchelor Show in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: batchelor; bho44; birthcertificate; birthers; certifigate; colb; congress; ignorers; obama; obroma; talkradio
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To: WOSG

“I bet any birther 10 to 1 odds any amount of money that his BC will say birthplace “Honolulu” when revealed.”

I’ll take that bet for $100.

Where do I sign up?

And, after 10 years, his real BC has still not been shown, what can I still collect? say, half?

Cuz he ain’t never gonna show it,

cuz it says 17/ barely 18 yr old Mom was in Kenya, and Grandma filed for her in Honolulu.

Unmarried “Stanley” (man, that right there tells you a lot!) was sent out of the country due to undue embarrassment to the Africa she loved so much.


101 posted on 07/29/2009 1:25:51 AM PDT by DontTreadOnMe2009 (So stop treading on me already!)
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To: WOSG

WOSG... you are right, do you really trust the words that come out of any ones mouth that is part of this administration? even our own center and center right don’t have the balls to question the birth cert, its political suicide, they all have something to hide and if they expose Obama, they in turn jeopardize exposing themselves by Obama. They are buying time for the forging to be perfect then it will be released, that is why everything should be out front, school records, passport, all of it. I’ll be the first to admit I took a oath many years ago to protect and defend the constitution, I still believe in that oath, and what I see this man and his administration doing to America needs to be stop, and if he continues on this way and this is the only to stop him by proving him a fraud, a liar, a cheat,a fake,a imposter and a hypocrite and I could think of alot more adjectives then so be it. This is exactly the same stuff that brought on the American revolution. Sorry now see what you’ve done your making feel like a radical right wing nut case.


102 posted on 07/29/2009 1:30:38 AM PDT by buggy02 (Never take life seriously, nobody gets out alive anyway.)
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To: HerrBlucher; SideoutFred; idontcare99; 2ndDivisionVet

>>>Yes, we are all loons, nutjobs, whackos and idiots

If the shoe fits. The lynch mobs against people on our own side such as Batchelor is strong circumstantial evidence.

>>>And in the age old ritual around here, as soon as a conservative says one thing that goes against what a few people here believe, they are immediately labeled as liberals, etc. The idea that John Batchelor is a liberal may be one of the funniest things I’ve ever read

Not to mention Anne Coulter and National Review for gods sake.

>>>The only thing that I can come up with is stimulus money

Sounds like the lameass Haliburton meme that the DU freaks lived on the last 8 years.


103 posted on 07/29/2009 1:56:13 AM PDT by tlb
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

He use to be on the radio on 630am in DC.


104 posted on 07/29/2009 2:13:18 AM PDT by personalaccts (Is George W going to protect the border?)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
[article title] John Batchelor: Paranoids Ate My Party

Hey, ****head. It ain't paranoia if they're really out to get you.

Write us an article about the intersection of ICC, ACORN, the New Party, Media Matters, The Tides Foundation, the Bilderbergers and Trilaterals and the CFR, SPP/NAFTA, WTO, LOST, and the NWO, and then get back to us about paranoia.

105 posted on 07/29/2009 2:29:58 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: personalaccts

I sniffed this guy out
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2263926/posts


106 posted on 07/29/2009 2:37:47 AM PDT by Three if by government
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To: WOSG
"Nothing has been omitted that related to eligibility, as the COLB has the listed place of birth. They have answered one question: Where was Obama born?"

No, actually they have not. The only thing that WILL answer that question is a release of a OFFICIAL photocopy of the long form birth certificate. All the rest of the "evidence" does NOT prove natural born citizenship status. The FACT that he has not released the info is sufficient to prove to me that he is hiding something. I guess you believe John Kerry is a hero, too.

107 posted on 07/29/2009 3:24:42 AM PDT by Wonder Warthog ( The Hog of Steel)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

I used to enjoy listening to Batchelor, while driving my son to work at night.

Claudia Rosett, who did a lot of early work exposing the UN’s oil-for-food scandal, was a frequent guest of his.

I was impressed that he discussed so many international topics with knowledgeable guests.

He used to mention that his mother was an Iranian.

I haven’t heard him recently.


108 posted on 07/29/2009 3:31:03 AM PDT by syriacus (Drill here, drill now so Americans can use their money toward health insurance, rather than fuel.)
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To: WOSG
You dont want proof. Once Obama gives proof you close up shop. for the open-minded, the case is already closed -he was born in Honolulu:

It doesn't matter where he was born if Obama Sr.'s marriage to Kezia Obama, his first wife, hadn't been annulled. If it hadn't been, then the Obama marriage to Miss Dunham was void under U.S. law, making Obama Jr. illegitimate but still a natural-born U.S. citizenship under Article II, even if he was born at the South Pole and watched over by penguins.

(The first marriage was supposedly a village affair, the Kenyan equivalent of a common-law marriage. Doesn't matter: it was valid under U.K. and colonial law.)

There is a train of questions about Obama Jr.'s citizenship status, about his adoption, expatriation, and later use of possibly non-U.S. travel documents, that wants dealing with. There is just a whole lot there that needs cleaning up.

109 posted on 07/29/2009 3:31:44 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: HerrBlucher
Yes, we are all loons, nutjobs, whackos and idiots for wanting Obama to show his vault bc like McCain did last year ....

With the MainSlimeMedia cranking up the heat and guys like Batchelor and Ann Coulter feeling it, the heat itself means the "birthers" [note the Left-wing term of abuse] are doing something right.

That kind of reaction isn't just the usual casual abuse, it's the Full Treatment, a mass application of the Politics of Personal Destruction, the same thing Newt got in 1995 and Sarah got last year. That means we are doing something right.

110 posted on 07/29/2009 3:36:23 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: WOSG

Okay, case closed. Now let’s just sit back and wait for it to go away.


111 posted on 07/29/2009 3:45:27 AM PDT by reasonisfaith (Liberals have neither the creativity nor the confidence to understand the truth of conservatism)
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To: WOSG
I will bet you any amount you want that Obama will not be impeach on the basis of any of this.

I don't think it will add up to impeachment either, but I can see one positive effect coming out of the birther craziness. Some middle-of-the-roaders we know -- so-called "independents" who don't follow politics, don't understand economic theory and who are easily lulled into complacency by the media -- are starting to question Obama's background, and the long list of missing academic, legislative and medical records.

The pedestal is starting to crack, and the Gates episode took another chunk out of it. Maybe, just maybe he's not the noble, post-racial fellow they thought they were voting for...

It's probable that Obama's minions are involved in both sides of this issue -- as the scathing mockers of "birthers," but also as encouraging birthers pushing the crazy stuff -- Kenya birth, bogus SS No.'s, killing of someone distantly involved with the passport file break-in, and, of course, generalized paranoia -- the crazier the better, to drown out the inevitable drip of actual facts that contradict his gloriously fictionalized biography.

112 posted on 07/29/2009 4:58:02 AM PDT by browardchad
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To: browardchad

Much of the frenzied birthers may actually be Obamas Acorns trying to cloud everything like throwing radar reflecting chaff in the air.

It does not matter to me where Obama was born, if or what his BC says, all that matters is the cumulative evidence that goes back long before the election that I have spent hundreds of hours filing away, everything from who paid for Obamas cell phones to the two botched swearing in ceremonies.

All of it is an overwhelming damnable amount of evidence that can absolutely beyond a doubt portray this individual as an Enemy of the State.

Its not about a birth certificate, its about who has managed to be POTUS and us stopping him from destroying America.

Chasing the birth certificate issue is like trying to paint your house with a toothbrush, it can eventually be done, we can all assemble and hold signs across the country and that again would be painting the house but instead we are throwing paint filled balloons at it.

There is a right way and proper tool for everything, we have to convince enough of Congress that there is a real legitimacy issue here, laws were broken and ignored, penalties must be enforced. Its time to expand the other relevant issues that disqualifies Obama from POTUS.


113 posted on 07/29/2009 5:17:08 AM PDT by Eye of Unk ("If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace." T. Paine)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet
The Daily Beast’s John Batchelor

John. What happened to you? Hanging out with Meghan McCain at The Daily Beast?

I use to like to listen to Batchelor when he was on WABC. And he was into conspiracies during the Clinton years. I can't understand why he would write this kind of MSDNC type talking points.

114 posted on 07/29/2009 5:23:48 AM PDT by McGruff (former Gov. Palin: I am going to exercise my freedom of speech.)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

Paranoids? You want to see paranoids?

Just listen to the mainstream media talk about Sarah Palin. Now THAT’S paranoid!


115 posted on 07/29/2009 5:50:13 AM PDT by RoadTest (I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. - John 14:6)
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To: 2ndDivisionVet

He’s over there with sex-pot Meghan McCain with his panties in a twist. She would be so happy to help him out with that if he would only ask the poor thing out on a date.

If this is all just a silly rumor on the fringe, then why all the sweat among the political establishment?

Leftists are going to try and use this to their advantage in smearing conservatives...yet over 40% of Americans consider themselves conservative. Most Americans want Obama and all politicans to obey the constitution which includes Obama’s qualification.

So the Left and their Rino plas are on a mission to smear 40% of the voters and anybody who is for holding politicans to the constitution?

Good luck with that strategy. The Left is sinking in public opinion with the strategy of smearing conservatives. Rinos are making it so the GOP is not getting full advantage to this shift.


116 posted on 07/29/2009 5:55:26 AM PDT by SaraJohnson
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To: Hoosier-Daddy

“Impeachment and removal with a Democrat Congress will not happen. “
I agree.

“Devastate to me means “render politically impotent”. “
Nothing Obama did in his past will be relevent to his political power now. If Wright and Ayers didnt do it, nothing will.

“I doubt very much that even if proven ineligible for the office, Obama would willingly leave. “
I agree. Besides, Obama is eligible two ways: Birth in Honolulu, and having a US citizen mother. (1986 INA law retoractively made those in Obama’s situation citizens at birth no matter where born).

“Obama supports Zelaya while he tramples the Honduran Constitution. This from a so-called Constitutional Scholar.”
This from a leftist who takes care of his own. We need to be wary of what O will do under duress.


117 posted on 07/29/2009 6:11:45 AM PDT by WOSG (OPERATION RESTORE AMERICAN FREEDOM - NOVEMBER, 2010 - DO YOUR PART!)
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To: DontTreadOnMe2009

“Cuz he ain’t never gonna show it”

I’ve been saying for some time that Obama beneftis from having the birthers, so he will never show the original BC, partly to keep this alive. So no, you cannot collect on the case of the BC not showing up. The bet’s not on unless it does.

The original BC says his birthplace is Honolulu. In order to collect on the bet it needs to be revealed and say otherwise.

Interesting that no birther will take me up on the original bet.

“Unmarried “Stanley” (man, that right there tells you a lot!) was sent out of the country due to undue embarrassment to the Africa she loved so much.” There’s zero evidence she was EVER in Africa, let alone as 9 months pregnant woman.


118 posted on 07/29/2009 6:16:11 AM PDT by WOSG (OPERATION RESTORE AMERICAN FREEDOM - NOVEMBER, 2010 - DO YOUR PART!)
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To: WOSG
"The original BC says his birthplace is Honolulu. In order to collect on the bet it needs to be revealed and say otherwise."

You've seen the original?? I seriously doubt that. What you MAY have seen was a computer generated forgery posted on an Obama supporting website. This is easily resolved---have the Hawaii Secretary of Public Health (or whatever his relevant title is), testify UNDER OATH that he has seen the original and it says Obama was born in Hawaii. A notarized statement will do quite nicely. Until something like that is done, legitimate doubt remains. A "press conference" statement means exactly nothing. Politicians make all sorts of "less than true" statements to the media all the time.

119 posted on 07/29/2009 6:28:33 AM PDT by Wonder Warthog ( The Hog of Steel)
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To: McGruff

What’s REALLY interesting is that last year, when this was all getting started on the blogs- Batchelor was all over it. He regularly had Larry Johnson on his show to discuss it and he was not thinking the way he writes now.

Ahhh well..the mystery continues and grows. Not just the questions about his birth- but the various reactions from well-known conservatives.

They all seem thoroughly embarrassed and full of tsk-tsk’s..


120 posted on 07/29/2009 6:39:06 AM PDT by SE Mom (Proud mom of an Iraq war combat vet)
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