Obama critics keep hope alive zombie Reagan will be nominated next week
With less than a week to go before Obama’s second inaugural, the Washington Post surveys the teabag-birther remnants:
Eldon Bell, a retired Air Force officer and physician, is making no plans to see Barack Obama’s second inauguration, in part because Bell considers the president arrogant and dishonest, but more so because Bell is not yet persuaded that the swearing-in will occur at all.
‘Whether I watch depends on who’s being inaugurated,’ says Bell, 78. ‘If it’s this guy, probably not, because I don’t pay much attention to illegitimate things.’
At this late date, Bell and his fellow believers in the notion that Obama was born overseas or is otherwise ineligible to be president still expect some court somewhere to buy into one of their theories. After more than 100 court cases, no judge has.
Even after Obama convincingly won reelection despite four years of low popularity ratings, a sluggish economy and a highly motivated opposition, advocates of various counterfactual theories about the president — he’s a foreigner, he’s a Marxist, he’s a Muslim — say they’re sticking to their fight.
‘This inauguration is a mistake and those who permit it to happen will have to live with their own consciences,’ says Bell, a former Washingtonian who retired to South Dakota.
And from the files of ‘conservatism has never failed, it has only been failed’ we have this:
Hard-core opponents say that even without another election, they will keep up their efforts to end Obama’s tenure. ‘We have to think about impeachment for abusing executive power,’ says Cliff Kincaid, who runs America’s Survival, a collection of Web-based groups portraying the nation as threatened by socialism, the United Nations and liberal culture. ‘The Republicans seem not to realize that Obama is a Marxist who wages class warfare and could not qualify for a sensitive government position based on his associates and his character.’
Kincaid, based in Owings, Md., recognizes that impeachment is a long shot, so he is focusing on pushing the GOP rightward. ‘We can survive Obama,’ he says, ‘but is there another Reagan-like conservative who can lead the charge? Romney refused to run as a conservative. We had a failure of conservative candidates and conservative media, not of conservative philosophy.’