America’s post-racial society produces ‘Birther Bill’
April 22nd, 2010 § 7 Comments
According to a recent poll run by the New York Times and CBS News, only 58% of Americans believe President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Some speculate that the shocking results have been perpetuated by ongoing right-wing propaganda campaigns designed to cast doubt on the Obama Administration as a whole. A “birther bill” was also recently approved in ex-presidential candidate John McCain’s home state of Arizona. If passed it would require Obama to present his birth certificate before appearing on the Arizona ballot in the event of a re-election campaign. Similar bills have also been proposed in other US States including Florida and Missouri.
Curiously enough, while Obama was born in Hawaii, McCain was born in the former Panama Canal Zone — an area that is no longer considered US territory.
With much of US congress dominated by the Israel Lobby and billions of US taxpayer dollars being sent to Israel every year while the Israeli leadership continues to defy the US administration and American interests in the region, it’s a wonder that Americans are questioning their President’s citizenship, rather than their congress’s loyalty.
The fact that the ‘birthers’ have been able to propagate these results with baseless claims speaks volumes about the power of propaganda; José Saramago’s Blindness is everywhere.
Just a darn minute, there, Jasmin!
This was a poll of **Tea Party supporters**, a small group on the extreme political right, not a sample of ALL Americans. And whether respondents answer such a question honestly is open to doubtf.
Barack Obama isn’t just the first African-American President of the United States. He is the first President in the modern era with a foreign-born parent. It didn’t help matters that some local officials in Kenya “attested” to Barack Obama being born there, either.
No, she’s right:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20002539-503544.html?tag=contentMain;contentBody
No, she’s manipulating the statistics.
Even among Americans in general, only twenty percent would affirmatively state they believed President Obama was born outside the US. A bigger proportion of respondents, twenty-two percent, said they didn’t know or **had no opinion**.
In that Barack Obama has never identified himself as a son of Hawaii–he counts Chicago as his home town–and spent his early childhood in Indonesia it’s not surprising that there is some confusion as to his birthplace.
The facts are right there, in the CBS link I published. Anyone who can read can see that whopping 58% staring in the face. The only one who is manipulating anything is you, with lies.
No point in discussing things with the willfully blind.
Show me where I’ve lied.
Among Americans in general, not Tea Party supporters, 78 percent either believe the President was born in the USA or don’t know or care where he was born.
Not every American is aware of the old provision in the US constitution as to the President having to be native-born. Many people just haven’t thought about it.
The poll questions say nothing about race, so what’s this “post-racial” stuff? Looks pretty biased to me.
Correction to above:
Make that combined figure 80 percent: 22 percent no opinion, 58 percent say born in the USA.
If Obomber would show his birth cert alongside the US territory hospital he was supposedly born in, them problem solved. Has this happened? It’s not a difficult resolution is it? Tell me why the Obamessiah shouldn’t show his birth cert?
To give the impression that such demands are some kind of Neocon movement is absolutely absurd. Questioning Obomber – just like Bush/Rove were successfully challenged about their election fiddling – is fully justified. And Carters accusations of racism (because people were expecting the Constitution upheld) is also pathetic.
If that animated waxwork dummy McCain, a nasty short tempered man by some accounts, has(had) his birth place give rise to a Constitutional problem then he shouldn’t have been allowed to be president either.
Why is gutter partisan reductionism idiocy appearing on PUSLE? As is the pseudo anti-Semitism associations.
Really, really poor job.