by ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Americans were offered closure Wednesday to one of among the multifarious strands of our national dementias. It took the drab guise of the “long-form” birth certificate, signed and filed in Hawaii on August 8, 1961, indicating that the president is a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office. But will the White House’s release of the certificate finish off the “birther” movement? Certainly not. We’re dealing here with cognitive dissonance.
Harold Camping, president of Family Stations Ministry, has been preaching for some time now to a vast and devoted national audience that God’s plan is to inaugurate the Second Coming and end the world by flooding on May 21, 2011 (thus achieving a Judeo-Christian planetary closure before the prime current pagan rival, the end of the Mayan calendar, scheduled for December 21, 2012.)
It’s a safe bet that Camping and his disciples will be saying on May 22 that his math was merely a year or two off, and the end is still nigh. His congregation will have its faith fortified. Membership will probably increase, as it did after the failure of Camping’s last prediction of the Second Coming, which he scheduled for September 6, 1994.
…
The words were scarcely out of Obama’s mouth and the document hardly lofted onto the White House website before leading birthers were expressing skepticism about the certificate as allegedly photo-shopped, also insisting that, anyway, it was a “side issue” and distraction from the serious matter of Obama’s qualifications as a “natural born citizen” as opposed to an ineligible Third World foundling from Kenya or Indonesia, as around 25 per cent of all Americans and 50 per cent of all Republicans have come to believe.
…
Obama isn’t popular. Sixty-seven per cent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. His job disapproval rating stands at 49 per cent. The job “disapproval” rating for Congress, with a House newly led by Republicans, stands at 71 per cent. Current Republican presidential candidates are, in order of popular esteem for their candidacies: Christian evangelical Mike Huckabee, who leads this field with a 17 per cent showing; circus barker Donald Trump; Mormon and failed aspirant in 2008 Mitt Romney; faded star Sarah Palin; adulterer Newt Gingrich; foe of Social Security and Medicare Ron Paul; nutball Michele Bachmann; and a trio of two-percenters: Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels and Rick Santorum, of whom former Senator Bob Kerrey once memorably said, “Santorum? Is that the Latin for asshole?”
These are not impressive or even endearing candidates, except for Paul on account of his anti-war/anti-Fed stance.) It’s hard to imagine any of them offering a credible challenge to as adaptable and opportunistic a candidate as Obama, who has just assigned the man once regarded as a credible Republican presidential candidate, General David Petraeus, as head of the CIA, thus taking him off the political chessboard, at least so far as 2012 is concerned.
It seems the man on the Fox Biz Channel auditioning to take Beck’s place spent an hour on Wednesday going over the flaws in the birth certificate. Gingrich said Thursday the whole thing remains fishy. They can’t let go – at least until cognitive dissonance blows a tire in the early primaries.
Counterpunch for more