So almost half the members in the Republican Party are birthers. Dave Weigel asks whether this paragraph from a profile of Obama's mother is going to be the new smoking gun:
Benji Bennington, a friend of Ann's from Hawaii, told me, "Sometimes when she talked about Barack, she'd say, 'well, my son is so bright, he can do anything he ever wants in the world, even be president of the United States'. I remember her saying that".'The book continues: 'Samardal Manan, who taught with Ann in Jakarta, remembered Ann saying something similar - that Barry could be, or perhaps wanted to be, the first black president.'
His mother's ambition was clearly not lost on the future U.S. president. When his Indonesian stepfather asked him once what he wanted to be when he grew up, he was probably expecting him to say an airline pilot or an athlete.
'"Oh, prime minister', Barry answered,' wrote Ms Scott.
This is a reminder of how part of how birtherism works is to transmute, through a process of mental alchemy that may or may not involve tinfoil, the mundane into the sinister. How many American parents have looked at their child and thought, "My kid could be president someday"? This is one of the great American cliches. If we somehow learned that Obama's mother cooked apple pies and left them on the windowsill so that the aroma could fill young Barry's nostrils as he ran home from baseball practice, the birthers would argue that apple pies are huge in Kenya. This is a part of the movement for the forseeable future, more popular among conservatives than voucherizing Medicare.
