re: #20 Charles

At this point, I’m absolutely convinced that the Birther insanity is being perpetuated by barely concealed racism. These are people who just can’t stand the idea that a black man has been elected to the presidency, but they have a vague sense that it might not be OK to come right out and say that. So instead, the suppressed racism is oozing out in this kind of craziness.

Imagine that Colin Powell were president. Now try to imagine birther conspiracy theories. It wouldn’t happen.

It isn’t that Obama is half black. He is, after all, half Kansas white-bread white, if you keep track. It’s that he grew up in an alien milieu, and the people caught up in this nonsense feel that whether or not he was born in Hawaii, his formative experiences include a lot from those alien settings. From that perspective, the birth certificate can be seen as accurate but nevertheless fake. So then people slide from that into believing, or making themselves believe, that even its de-jure accuracy must somehow be fake.

This sort of way of looking at things has to be a lot more seductive to somebody who’s never been abroad. If you’ve seen more of the world, you realize that having a mother from Kansas, and spending some of your childhood years in Hawaii, will be sufficient to make you an American in fact as well as in law.