I haven't written anything about birthers for a while because I generally thought they were finished -- discredited by the hysterical conspiracy mongering and infighting of their most prominent spokespeople. But that was before the most popular politician in the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, embraced birtherism, as she did yesterday on the Rusty Humphries radio show:
PALIN: I think it's a fair question just like I think past associations and past voting records. All of that is fair game. You know, I've got to tell you too, I think our campaign, the McCain-Palin campaign didn’t do a good enough job in that area. We didn’t call out Obama and some of his associates on their records and what their beliefs were, and perhaps what their future plans were, and I don’t think that was fair to voters to not have done our job as candidates and a campaign to bring to light a lot of things that now we’re seeing manifest in the administration.
HUMPHRIES: I mean, truly if your past is fair game and your kids are fair game, certainly Obama’s past should be. I mean, we want to treat men and women equally, right?
PALIN: Hey, you know, that's a great point. And that weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn't my real son, and a lot of people that went “Well, you need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he's your kid,” which we have done, but yeah, so maybe we can reverse that, and use the same [inaudible] thinking on the other one.
The Nixon impression continues -- birtherism is fair game, according to Palin, because some people foolishly, and in many cases maliciously, questioned whether or not Trig was her real son. Someone has to pay for that. Palin's primary motivation in politics appears to be spite, which I suppose explains why she remains locked in a very public battle of wills with the father of her daughter's child.
Between denying the existence of global warming or evolution, believing that ACORN stole the 2008 election, and any number of conspiracy theories involving the president's origins, some Republicans have show that they're completely willing to embrace nutty ideas absent any empirical evidence supporting them. Conservatives who embrace these ideas have become part of a kind of oppositional culture that denies certain facts as a matter of self-definition, an act of defiance against an oppressive wider culture -- not unlike the Nation of Islam in the '60s believing white people were created 6,000 years ago by a mad scientist named Yakub.
Many of the most dedicated partisans on the right, however, refused to embrace birtherism in particular, because it's so self-evidently stupid. I suspect that now, some of those holdouts will fold, given that criticism of Palin is verboten. I'm sure we'll see a lot of dissembling about how she didn't necessarily "embrace" birtherism but just "didn't have a problem with it." Or perhaps they'll embrace her rationalization about Trig as their own.
Dave Weigel writes that if someone said it was "fair" to raise questions about whether the government caused 9/11, it would be "interpreted as a flat-out endorsement of the 'truthers.'” We don't need the hypothetical. We have Van Jones. After all, the 9/11 truther petition he signed simply asked for their questions about 9/11 to "be addressed publicly, honestly, and rigorously."
They uh, just wanted the "truth." Just like Palin.
UPDATE: Weigel points out that Palin has since walked back her comments on her Facebook page. I'm afraid the damage has already been done--she's already legitimized this line of "questioning." You can't unblow the dogwhistle.
-- A. Serwer
