I’ve thought that the birth certificate issue was a political broad axe, created by Axelrod and wielded by the campaign to cut off discussion of the man who is Barack Obama. The core Alinskyite political tool is ridicule. The press conference this morning was the money shot in a multi-year induced ridicule campaign, designed to conflate and discredit people who want to know anything about the mind, the thinking, the philosophical and intellectual underpinnings of Barack Obama, with the fringe, the radical, the extreme.
As every single word in this “press conference” (did he answer any questions this morning?) is the culmination of years of work, perhaps we should examine this closely. Not to see if this President is lying about where he was born, but to demonstrate how they use language to say things which could plausibly be argued to be true, but which, in toto, in delivery, and in interpretation by their philosophical soulmates in the media, are manipulative to the point of deception. Notice it was short enough to not need TOTUS and he took no questions.
From the Obama Axelrod Plouffe perspective. Three audiences, sometimes to all. The media 500 (M500), the cognoscenti, and the unwashed. If the media 500 are handled correctly they will take care of the unwashed for us. We do, as always, have to provide a level of credibility for our cognoscenti, to allow them to maintain their suspension of dis-belief.
THE PRESIDENT: Hello, everybody. Now, let me just comment, first of all, on the fact that I can’t get the networks to break in on all kinds of other discussions — (laughter.) (To M500. Can you believe that those yokels are making us waste our valuable time on this? Sorry guys, let’s laugh at them together.) I was just back there listening to Chuck — he was saying, it’s amazing that he’s not going to be talking about national security. I would not have the networks breaking in if I was talking about that, Chuck, and you know it. (To M500. Keep laughing, but remember, we keep track of who is saying what.)
Q Wrong channel (some reporter: not me, I Still Believe). (Laughter.) (M500 to Obama : We’re with you.)
THE PRESIDENT: As many of you have been briefed (to M500 we told you first remember), we provided additional information today about the site of my birth. Now, this issue has been going on for two, two and a half years now (we’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of it and it has worked beautifully) . I think it started during the campaign. (I think? And which campaign, against Hillary). And I have to say that over the last two and a half years I have watched with bemusement (to M500: us, we know this is BS, and anyone who has any doubts about my history is dumb, un-cultured, uneducated, illogical) , I’ve been puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going (we thought you would catch on a lot earlier you saps). We’ve had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican (well, the one Republican), every news outlet that has investigated this, confirm that, yes, in fact, I was born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital. (Brilliant, no? We start with something that is true, we leave a honeypot of mystery, the suckers rush in, and we discredit any inquiries into the history of this man).
We’ve posted the certification that is given by the state of Hawaii on the Internet for everybody to see (2 and one half years later). People have provided affidavits that they, in fact, have seen this birth certificate (so, I showed it to people, yet I have not done what I did today). And yet this thing just keeps on going (and it’s not over by a long shot- forget asking anything about my past in the 2012 campaign).
Now, normally I would not comment on something like this, because obviously there’s a lot of stuff swirling in the press on at any given day and I’ve got other things to do. (To M500 – I’m serious, these other guys are below your contempt) But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education (more deficit spending to the teachers unions) and infrastructure (we’re not forgetting all of the other unions either guys) and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors (Republicans want seniors eating cat food between serving cocktails to the rich) even as we were closing the deficit (my budget never ever ever closes the deficit), during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here. (To M500 – are we losing you guys? We thought you were sophisticated. Maybe you don’t really belong on the inside)
And so I just want to make a larger point here. We’ve got some enormous challenges out there. There are a lot of folks out there who are still looking for work . Everybody is still suffering under high gas prices. (Fucking Bush) We’re going to have to make a series of very difficult decisions about how we invest in our future (keep spending) but also get a hold of our deficit and our debt (that damn TEA party meme needs a shot to the head) — how do we do that in a balanced way(Republicans want seniors eating cat food between serving cocktails to the rich. Say it with me this time M500) .
And this is going to generate huge and serious debates, important debates. And there are going to be some fierce disagreements — and that’s good. That’s how democracy is supposed to work (The Madison style of democracy, not those pesky elections). And I am confident that the American people and America’s political leaders can come together in a bipartisan way and solve these problems (really this is the crux – we might be able to work with the Establishment Republicans, but they have got to get rid of this tea party birther baggage). We always have. (Play ball boys and we can go back to business as usual. Doesn’t your district need some road work?)
But we’re not going to be able to do it if we are distracted. We’re not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other (to M500 – remember when I ambushed Ryan? And what Fed press conference?). We’re not going to be able to do it if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts (haaaaaaa, I just can’t believe my balls, I really have brass balls as big as my head. Seriously though, making stuff up is for amateur liars). We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers. (Donald you popped my con early you prick.)
We live in a serious time right now and we have the potential to deal with the issues that we confront in a way that will make our kids and our grandkids and our great grandkids proud (those damn TEA Partiers are getting some traction with this too). And I have every confidence that America in the 21st century is going to be able to come out on top just like we always have. But we’re going to have to get serious to do it.
I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest. But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness (people are starting to ask questions about my college days. Next thing you know they are on to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, etc.; it’s time for the blowoff). We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do. We’ve got big problems to solve. And I’m confident we can solve them, but we’re going to have to focus on them (to M500: my opponents are nekulturny. You should focus on how their extreme plans will wreck Americas debt rating and put Grandpa out on the ice floe) — not on this (Best Con Ever).
Thanks very much, everybody. (I’m off to see the egress, Suckers!)
END (scene, exit stage right)
Yep.
Although Trump may have done us (those wanting a better president) a favor in forcing Team Obama to disclose their “Trump” card if you will now as opposed right in the middle of the re-election race. I do not think Axelrod wanted to do this now.
Gotta say (and I won’t say it often), but I still don’t buy it. The Democratic governor and secretary of health both claimed they couldn’t find the birth certificate. Publicly. My guess is actually the opposite {put on tinfoil hat}, Trump or Corsi were probably going to produce credible evidence that Obama was born somewhere else, like Vancouver, and the previous excuses of “the records were burned/flooded and can’t be found” were going to look flimsy. Flimsy enough to force him not to run in 2012.
The idea of this as a political ploy makes no sense. Why no spring the trap on Hillary? Or McCain? Why push it so hard that 62% of Americans aren’t certain you were born in this country — for a re-election strategy?
I never bought the birther angle. All that bothered me was that he was apparently afraid to come clean. I continue to wonder why he is so secretive about his past, especially his college years. I think there might be plenty there to mock. Basically what we have is a President who was never vetted properly by the press because they were afraid they would prove that their savior was only a flawed man, just like we’re all flawed humans. And Obama cannot be allowed to be merely human.
OMG OMG OMG!
Glenn Beck produces the REAL birth certificate.
PROVES! That Obama is the antichrist!
The creater of the teleprompter recently died, so perhaps TOTUS was in mourning.
I agree wholeheartedly that they let the birther thing go on indefinitely to use guilt by association on all the other criticisms of Obama. The only reasons they finally came forward with the document are that the poll numbers started to be affected by the Donald’s taking up the cause and without Axelod running a tight ship the handlers panicked.
Of course, there are already people claiming its a fake so the guilt by association meme for all criticism of The Won lives on!
Ella, I think the plan was in reaction to birthers raising the issue, and Alexrod (and perhaps Rahm) saw it as an opportunity to take advantage of. But I always thought Obama was born in Hawaii–the idea of his supporters running a ad in Hawaii to announce his birth to give cover on his birth location so this half black african-half American haole kid could run for president 48 years later seems a bit far fetched unless they happen to have a time machine. This was 1961 when air travel to Kenya from Hawaii was hardly easy (hell it is not really easy now).
But is Obama hiding stuff? Damn straight. I am sure the college applications are a friggin gold mine of inconsistencies, as are his records from Columbia. And he does look a lot more like Frank Marshall Davis than his purported father.
Joe, meh, the announcement is just an announcements. My aunts were both born in Germany, and birth announcements ran in the Bradley, Oklahoma, newspaper because my grandparents were there and reported it. I don’t know about Kenya (though, ironically enough, he has a birth certificate there, too), but Vancouver seemed plausible, since Stanley Ann was in Vancouver less than 2 weeks after his birth.
Mainly, I have more trust in Hillary’s opp research than the MSM.
Now any questioning of his background will be subject to mockery by the M500…” he done showed us his birth certificate – we know all about his past – shut up you idiots.”
This is an attempt to shut down all conversation about all aspects of his past. It’s the Clintonian “that subject has already been addressed, move along” Hail Mary. Except that I’m not sure that disclosing the birth cert silences the questions. Alot of folks are thrashing about for a suitiable cover for not voting for this asshat.
When people are looking for food and you take away the low hanging fruit, they will look around and up higher for something else to eat. The hunger doesn’t go away by removing the visible food. It’s just harder to get. And it’s very difficult to convince a hungry man he doesn’t need to eat.
Stephanie, yep. And my big question now is: why did he spend $2 million in legal fees to avoid releasing his birth certificate? Why the mystery? And why didn’t he get 50 copies from the Honolulu courthouse and hand them out like Easter candy to the press corps, as opposed to letting them “view” it and then releasing a PDF? Why all the mystery?
I think we can safely assume that at least part of the answer is, “because he’s a jerk.”
My personal take on the why $2 mil as I commented elsewhere today:
The payments to the law firm to fight this was subrosa payback to keep Sarah Palin in check. The law firm was the group that kept the trolls in Alaska in high cotton overturning trashcans for info on her.
It’s not the birth certificate, it’s the ‘cover up.’ Why spend meellyons of dollars on a non issue? To funnel money to your PI investigating law firm without raising a stink about oppo research.
The birth cert would probably have been released before the election (don’t candidates usually release them a month or so prior to the election) if the campaign didn’t feel the need to keep funneling money to the oppo researchers to keep Palin in check.
The ‘Trump card’ has forced a significant foreclosure of the expenditures of additional sums to the law firm to go after Palin. Either they think she is sufficiently neutralized (doubtful) or they were sufficiently spooked by the latest polls. Either way, their subrosa warlords are taken off the chess board.
I think the reason Team Obama released this today, rather than next year in the middle of a re-election campaign, is because they have internal polls that show they are no longer getting any mileage trying to portray the GOP and the entire conservative half of the country as loony conspiracy theorists.
I would like all the people who have spent the past two years telling me Obama had already released his birth certificate to explain to me what it is exactly he has released just now.
I would also like for Donald Trump to explain how Obama releasing something Trump just assured us didn’t in fact exist is somehow a victory for Trump.
I would mostly like a face to face meeting between the two in which Obama’s cigarette lighter ignited Trump’s hair spray and blew them both straight to hell.
B.Moe, from your lips (or keyboard as the case may be) to God’s ears.
I really LOL’d, B Moe. Thanks.
Oddly enough, just four days ago Linda Chavez wrote an OpEd for the Washington Examiner telling us the “truth about that Obama birth certificate”.
Darn inconsiderate of Obama to make so many of his supporters in the press look like idiots. But then they didn’t need much help from him.
Failing employee: “You just have to keep me on! It’s like, super important! For the country and stuff! Look, here’s my birth certificate, the REAL one!”
Boss: “Nice. But that’s not why I asked you to come to the office.”
F.E.: “Oh. What was it then?”
Boss: “Seems there’s a small matter of 3 trillion missing from petty cash…”
F.E.: “And you think I’m a thief because I’m black?”
Boss: “Well, actually, it was more the his-and-hers Rolls Royces…”
Boss: “Plus, none of the other clerks are spending a billion dollars on television commercials about how awesome they are.”
Hehs.
F.E.: “So… it is because I’m black, then.”
Boss: “no it is your thieving white half we’re concerned about. white people stole this country from the native americans. we can’t trust your whiteness.”
F.E.: “I’ve had the white
washedexorcised right out of me. What do you think all those years at Columbia and Harvard Law and sitting in the pews listening to the Reverend Wright’s sermons on ‘Whitey’s to blame’ were all about?”Boss: “so where’s your transcripts to prove that you successfully completed the necessary indoctrination?”
F.E.: “honkey!”
[…]
F.E.: “dead honkey.”
F.E.: “Look cracker, you hired me on the recommendation of your H.R. Dept. because the other interviewee was too old and too crazy. You don’t like it, that’s your problem. Don’t make me get all EEOC on your pasty ass. I want my fringe benefits!”
As I recall that sketch, there’s a “honkey honkey!” in there before Chase dropped the n-bomb.
Boss: “We’re a fast-food store and you were hired because you’re the owner’s second cousin by marriage. And he only made me hire you because his wife insisted on it. But now that she’s left him for a Peruvian soccer player he doesn’t give a damn anymore.”
Boss: “do you smoke pot? we have evidence of you doing that. the eeoc won’t help oppressive white people. because if your claim your father’s race is determinative then you are a half white muslim. that’s how muslims think about such things. so hr is embracing the multiculturalism.”
B. Moe,
What was released before (and displayed at factcheck.org) is a “Certification of Live Birth”, a new document produced by the State of Hawaii, with an official embossed seal. It reproduces the essential information contained in the original birth certificate, but is different document than the long-form birth certificate. The “Birthers” have insisted ever since that somehow it is not a legal document, but it is the document you would receive if you requested a copy of your birth certificate form the State where you were born.
As a footnote: when my mother applied for a Passport some 8 years ago, her long-form birth certificate her parents received from the State of Missouri in 1943 was rejected by the State Department as proof of citizenship because it did not have an embossed seal. She had to get a Certification of Live Birth from Missouri with the embossed seal before they would issue her a passport.
You will notice that Obama’s long-form birth certificate has no embossed seal. My 1961 California long-form birth certificate has no embossed seal, either.
You’re correct on the sketch, Ernst, but I am laaayzeeeeee.
“This is incredibly Racist.“
Well this kind of intemperate language certainly isn’t helpful Mr. Tapper.
Here you go:
Some years back, Hawaii decided to move to a strictly digital vital records system. All of the paper docs were keyed into the database, and then they were locked away. From that point forward, everyone gets a printout of the information from the database, which is a perfectly legal birth certificate. That’s what he released in 2008. (See Factcheck.org)
This is a certified photocopy of the original, which they’re really not supposed to do, according to HI law. But now that Democrats are running the place, they don’t really worry about the rules, so they went to the vault, copied that bitch and hooked Barack up.
I blame Trump. Who looks a lot like Geraldo right now, if you ask me.
That would rock You Tube.
Motion view – the comments on that Tapper post were hysterical.
Is that the first JournoList to call him out on a lie?
Please take a look at this picture, and then tell me I’m wrong. He thinks he nailed, absolutely nailed The Blowoff.
Hmmm… I see an invisible cock entering his mouth from the right, mv.
Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Title of this post is The Blowoff.
Heh.
Well JD I was thinking a little about this too. You’ll notice that even though Tapper may the least herd-minded of the M500 he still can’t quite bring himself to use the “L” word, the headline is “untruth” and in the text he just says “But the president was wrong”. I thought that the claim was suspicious in blogosphere terms, but then I figured if Obama was talking about press coverage he meant Stewart Colbert and Behar.
I’m crying bh I’m laughing too hard.
Now that was good, bh.
Kevin Durant is a fucking stud.
Spiny Norman@32: Sufficient proof of being a US citizen is not equivalent to sufficient proof of being a natural born US citizen. One is a subset of the other.
The Fed is going to help Obama win? http://www.cnbc.com/id/42794512
Quantative easing? It sounds like nursing a hard crap out so you don’t blow an o-ring.
Seems the damn thing was photoshopped or some such.
Oh dear.
Got that from over on gateway pundit or jawa report, on the innertubes anyway.
“Hey RUBE!”
Richard Cranium
Barack Hussein Obama Jr is a natural-born US citizen. As was his mother. As is my mother. As am I. End of story.
Or is your nick an indication of sarcasm to follow? ;^)