Friday, August 27, 2010

The Resurgence of Know Nothingism

Having shed much of his dignity, core convictions and reputation for straight talk, Senator John McCain won his primary on Tuesday against the flat-earth wing of his party. Now McCain can go search for his lost character, which was last on display late in his 2008 campaign for president.

Remember the moment: a woman with matted hair and a shaky voice rose to express her doubts about Barack Obama. “I have read about him,” she said, “and he’s not — he’s an Arab.”

McCain was quick to knock down the lie. “No, ma’am,” he said, “he’s a decent family man, a citizen.”

That ill-informed woman — her head stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler — now makes up a representative third or more of the Republican party. It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
Read the rest here.

3 comments:

David L Alexander said...

I remember that woman. What she said was "he's a Muslim." At most, Obama would be considered an apostate under Islam, having been raised one at some point as a child in Indonesia, and having since refuted it by his affiliation with a Christian house of worship.

So, is he a Muslim? If he is, he's not a very good one, by their own reckoning.

mjl said...

Ok, I promise to quit commenting on your blog four times a day.

I will say this much, though: I trust Obama when he states that he is a practicing Christian within a liberal Protestant practice. In fact, I trust it more than the word of a man who claims to be a proponent of traditional marriage by partaking in at least four over his lifetime.

Anastasia Theodoridis said...

My recollection is that she said 'Arab.'

But no matter; the point is that the corruption in politics and including the press is astounding.