The Wrap
There it was in black and white, down the bottom of a back page of the Washington Post yesterday. President Barack Obama, it turns out, is an American.
This of course is news to no one except those who will always believe that Obama is a Manchurian candidate from Kenya via Indonesia. The only reason it was in the Post at all was because Arizona’s Secretary of State, Ken Bennett, had just come around to the notion.
Bennett had made the news last week after declaring that he would not put the President’s name on ballots in Arizona until Hawaii proved – yet again – that Obama was born there.
Hawaii duly provided the evidence, again, and eventually Bennett recanted. The President’s name would appear on the ballot “as long as he fills out the same paperwork and does the same things that everybody else has,” Bennett said. As though Obama had ever planned not to. As though Bennett was making a liberal concession.
“What is so sacred or untouchable about this question that you can’t even ask the question?” he said.
That’s the thing with birthers, they never ask any other candidates to prove their place of birth.
Bennett had perhaps jumped on the birther bandwagon having made the political decision that in Arizona at least, too much radical conservatism is never enough.
He claimed he was not a birther, but was simply responding to thousands of emails he had received from people demanding he remove Obama’s name from the ballot.
Also in Arizona, Sherriff Joe Arpaio, who was first elected in 1992, declared this week that he was not satisfied that Obama had proved his place of birth.
“I’m trying to determine if any fraud occurred and who’s responsible,” said the Sheriff, who has had a cold case posse working on the case for seven months now.
The Sheriff said the verification that the secretary of state received from the Hawaii registrar is not evidence enough. “Let me see the micro film or an original copy of the birth certificate and I’d go home.”
Most Republicans are now embarrassed by the birther movement, which was effectively ridiculed in Arizona this week by an email campaign to have Bennett investigate claims that presumptive Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, was a unicorn.
Meanwhile in Topeka, Kansas a nine-year-oid boy has taken on the Westboro Baptist Church, the mob that for years has been rallying with obscene signs at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan in the belief that God is punishing America for its tolerance of homosexuality.
Josef Miles stood before church members holding their “God Hates Fags” signs with his own sign reading “God Hates No One”.
Asked on Thursday afternoon by National Public Radio how he came up with his slogan he said, “I just thought about it for a minute.”
