Craziest Republican of the Day: Louis Gohmert

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Republicans love their anti-Obama conspiracy theories, but Rep. Louis "terror babies" Gohmert (R-Tex.), one of the craziest around, was able to kick it up a notch on Wednesday by linking health-care reform to the current intervention in Libya:

It's a bad bill. And then when you find out that the prior Congress not only passed that 2,800 page bill with all kinds of things in it, including a new president's commissioned officer corps and non-commissioned officer corps. Do we really need that? I wondered when I read that in the bill. But then when you find out we're being sent to Libya to use our treasure and American lives there, maybe there's intention to so deplete the military that we're going to need that presidential reserve officer commissioned corps and non-commissioned corps that the president can call up on a moment's notice involuntarily, according to the Obamacare bill.

Umm... what? I realize that Republicans aren't quite sure what to do about Libya -- they generally support military intervention of any kind but also oppose anything Obama does, making it tricky -- but this is stupid even by their standards.

Suggesting that Obama is using Libya to unleash some private presidential army on America? That's insane. As Media Matters explains (you know, because it has the facts at hand):

Despite the claims in right-wing chainemails, the health care law did not give Obama some sort of "private army."The legislation did create the ReadyReserve Corps, a new component of the U.S. Public Health ServiceCommissioned Corps, but there was nothing nefarious about it. The purpose ofthe Ready Reserve Corps is simply to make the Public Health Service -- whichpreviously "did not have a reserve component to call upon" in times of crisis -- better prepared to respond to emergencies.

As FactCheck.org noted after thebill passed, "Thetruth about the new Ready Reserve Corps is a lot less interesting than theconspiracy theories." But of course, Gohmert has always been more interestedin conspiracytheories thanthe truth.

Gohmert and so many others in the Republican Party, which continues its descent into madness without so much as a glimmer of hope.

(image -- along with more craziness from Gohmert)

Long live Birtherism!

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As Politico reports, Birtherism, the claim that President Obama was not born in the U.S. and is therefore in office illegitimately, is alive and well all across the country:

The opening of 2011 state legislative sessions has been accompanied by a spate of birther-related bills, the clearest indication yet that the controversy surrounding President Barack Obama's place of birth will continue to simmer throughout his reelection campaign.

Lawmakers in at least 10 states have introduced bills requiring presidential candidates to provide some form of proof that they are natural-born citizens, a ballot qualification rule designed to address widespread rumors on the right that Obama was not born in the United States.

On the face, this is basically meaningless. For Birther legislation to have been introduced in 10 states, all you need is 10 crazy right-wing conspiracy-mongering Republican legislators. And ridiculous legislation pops up all the time -- like, for example, proposing that South Carolina should have its own currency.

Certainly some such legislation could pass in a crazy Republican-dominated state -- like, for example, South Carolina -- but the bigger problem is that Birtherism has essentially become pretty standard fare in the GOP, even as its leadership sends mixed signals about it, as is the equally ridiculous claim that Obama is a Muslim. (He's not. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Unless you're a Republican, in which case you probably think there is.)

Take how John Boehner shuffled his way through some admirably tough questioning on Meet the Press on Sunday:

GREGORY: Do you not think it's your responsibility to stand up to that kind of ignorance?

BOEHNER: David, it's not my job to tell the American people what to think. Our job in Washington is to listen to the American people. Having said that, the state of Hawaii has said that he was born there. That's good enough for me. The president says he's a Christian. I accept him at his word.

GREGORY: But isn't that a little bit fast and loose? I mean, you are the leader in Congress and you are not standing up to obvious facts and saying these are facts, and if you don't believe that it's nonsense?

BOEHNER: I just outlined the facts as I understand them. I believe that the president is a citizen. I believe the president is a Christian, I'll take him at his word.

GREGORY: But that kind of ignorance over whether he's a Muslim doesn't concern you?

BOEHNER: Listen, the American people have the right to think what they want to think. I can't -- it's not my job to tell them.

GREGORY: Why isn't it your job to stand up and say, no, the facts are these? Didn't John McCain do that in --

BOEHNER: I just --

GREGORY: When you're saying "it's good enough for me," are you really standing up and saying, for those that believe that, or who would talk about that -- you had a member of Congress, you had a new Tea Party freshman, who was out just yesterday speaking to conservatives and he said, "I'm fortunate enough to be an American citizen by birth and I do have a birth certificate to prove it." That was Raul Labrador, a new Congressman from Idaho. Is that an appropriate way for your members to speak?

BOEHNER: The gentleman was trying to be funny, I would imagine, but remember something  -- it really is not our job to tell the American people what to believe and what do think. There's a lot of information out there, people read a lot of things, but I --

GREGORY: You shouldn't stand up to misinformation or stereotypes?

BOEHNER: I've made clear what I believe the facts are.

Well, maybe, but of course he wants to have it both ways. Boehner obviously knows -- not just believes -- that Obama was born in the U.S. and is a Christian -- but also realizes that he can't dismiss the anti-Obama movement in his own party, given how prevalent it is in the base. And so he hedges: He takes Obama at his word, but, hey, maybe Obama's word shouldn't be taken. He believes he knows the facts, but he could be wrong. In other words, he's covering both sides of his ass, talking bullshit to make it seem as if he's the sane leader of an insane party while refusing to say anything definitive, anything that might upset the Birthers and Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim crazies. Indeed, far from condemning them, he's actually legitimizing them, and their views, by refusing to take a stand for the obvious truth. (Yes, they have a right to their views, but that doesn't mean all views are equally legitimate or that you can't criticize any views at all.)

And don't even get me started on that whole "we're here to listen to the American people, not tell them what to think" stupidity. Please. That's pure dishonesty, and, lamely defending himself on national TV, a ridiculous cop-out. If that's what he thinks political leadership is, or leadership of any kind, he should resign immediately. But not before voting to un-repeal the Affordable Care Act, which even around the elections last November, when Republicans took back the House, had the support of a majority of the American people.

Are you listening, Speaker Boehner? Stop the insanity.

(Although, come to think of it, I'm fine with the Republicans embracing all the insanity they can handle. And if that includes more and more Birtherism, hey, why not? The Democrats, including the president himself, just look better and better by comparison as Republicans move further to the right and further into the clutches of demented and deeply bigoted conspiracy theories.)

Many questions, few answers left in Tucson’s wake

By Nicholas Wilbur 

What is government if words have no meaning?

That was the question Jared Lee Loughner posed to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in their first meeting. In their second meeting, he shot her in the head.

The round-the-clock media circus has taken a swipe at every minute detail of Loughner's life in an attempt to understand his motivations for killing six and wounding 14 others in the attempted assassination of a congresswoman.

Unfortunately, the 24-hour-a-day speculation-based coverage of every non-development and irrelevant insight into the life of the accused has taken center-stage in a nation-wide theater production that continues to say a lot but reveal almost nothing.

Loughner has remained silent. The 250 federal officials tasked with investigating the horrific shooting have failed to deliver a motive. And so the media is left chasing its tail in an attempt to assemble a puzzle that has no pieces.

We know he's male. We know he's white. We know he was kicked out of community college for saying weird shit. Based on the videos he posted on YouTube, we know he has a severe distrust of the government, a fascination with the gold standard, and an obsession with currencies, new languages, and grammar.

Are we to believe, as some have claimed, that Loughner was so disgruntled about Giffords' failure to adequately answer the "what is government" question that he decided to try and assassinate her? Was his passion for the gold standard so strong that it drove him to murder, that he thought Giffords was an inadequate leader because she hadn't created her own language, or that his plot to kill the Arizona Democrat was retribution for her not electing him as her campaign treasurer, where he would be in charge of creating a new currency?

Maybe.

Or maybe Loughner had a girlfriend in the Farmtown game on Facebook who dumped him because his land wasn't well kept, and in a fit of rage he took a semi-automatic pistol to a political event. Maybe he read a violent comic book or played violent video games. Maybe he wasn't breastfed as a baby. Maybe he didn't eat his Wheaties. These aren't the actual hypotheses the media have concocted to fill news pages and clog up the airwaves, but they're just as useful in understanding Loughner's motive.

The truth is, we still know almost nothing about his real motivations, and the media's continuous attempts to make sense of his gibberish have become vexing.

I'm not one to delve too deeply into conspiracies theories (mainly because any good conspiracy is unprovable and therefore a gargantuan waste of time), but as the media begin their second week of continuous coverage of this tragedy, my hopes for an explanation – other than insanity – are dwindling.

It's entirely possible that nothing will ever be revealed that adequately explains this tragedy, that there will never be closure for the families who lost loved ones and the victims who are left wondering, "Why me?"

Such an unsatisfying and unresolved ending to the Tucson tragedy wouldn't be unprecedented. The many unanswered questions surrounding the assassination of JFK, the Oklahoma City bombing, and 9/11 – even Roswell, the alleged plot to kill Princess Diana, and the moon landing "hoax" – continue to plague many Americans who struggle with the frustration of the unknown with every anniversary.

It's unlikely that even Loughner himself could provide us with a satisfying answer to the nonsensical question he posed to Giffords, or to the shooting itself. In tragedy, there is no satisfaction.

But it would be better than nothing, which is what we have now.

 

(Cross-posted from Muddy Politics.)

How conservatives are deflecting responsibility for the Arizona shooting

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I've written it again and again, including earlier today: There may be no perfectly direct connection between conservatism and the Arizona shooting, but that does not necessarily mean that what Jared Lee Loughner did (or, rather, is charged with doing) may be detached entirely from the broader, right-wing political context that may very well have informed his thinking, or his derangement, to some degree. And while he is evidently not a card-carrying member of the Tea and/or Republican Party, it is wrong to treat him as a detached loner, as a victim of mental illness who acted purely in a vacuum of his own derangement. 

This is the case conservatives are making -- that Loughner is crazy -- and it's their way of avoiding any and all responsibility not just for the shooting itself but more broadly for constructing the socio-political context behind it.

For more on this, see David Dayen at FDL, who says what many of us have said, and keep saying, but that we need to keep saying, not least with the right, which has been on the defensive since the Arizona shooting, trying desperately to impose its responsibility-deflecting we didn't do anything, we're victims of a left-wing plot narrative:

Republicans have pulled off a neat trick with respect to Jared Loughner. They have worked very hard to characterize him as a "whacko" and a "nutjob" (inadvertently hurting the prospect of a successful prosecution, by the way), going so far as to use the shooting as an opportunity to revamp the nation’s mental health system. I'm all for that, but the ulterior motive from the right is to absolve themselves of blame and marginalize the voices talking about overheated political rhetoric.

Now, you don't have to believe that Sarah Palin purchased the gun for Loughner and whispered in his ear about targets to believe that the rhetoric on the far, far right played a role in amping up the paranoia of a mentally unbalanced man...

The more you read by Loughner, or the more videos you see from him, they reflect these beliefs very strongly. He mentions the Constitution, illegal laws, manipulated currency, government control through grammar, and on and on. It's quite hard to follow, and it's not organized coherently, but it comes from a fairly precise place.

It's not necessary for Loughner to even understand the derivations of these conspiracy theories, or to be of sound mind, to be influenced by them. But they come from a very toxic, militia-friendly, anti-government place, and over the past couple decades the distance between that perspective and the mainstream right has absolutely narrowed; see Glenn Beck. The Birchers, militia groups and Alex Jones conspiracy ranters will always be with us; an isolated few scientists argued in favor of a flat earth well into the 19th century. The point that many who study this make is that mainstreaming some of these conspiracies, like when Lou Dobbs puts the North American Union on television, or when Beck hosts a Bircher on his radio show or concocts some bizarre blackboard theory, it hypes up and leads to greater attention to the real nutters on the fringe. And in the hands of a troubled mind, these conspiracies can do real damage.

As they did in Oklahoma City, as they did in Arizona, and as they will continue to do so long as they are not only embraced by the right but "mainstreamed" right into the heart of the GOP.

"Birther King" to challenge Obama (and America's patience) in 2012

By Nicholas Wilbur

The self-described "king of the birthers," Andy Martin, has announced he will run for president in 2012 and campaign on a mostly symbolic platform aimed more at shaping the debate of the election than actually garnering votes.

Four decades of unabashed anti-Semitism, homophobia, and conspiratorial lunacy have convinced voters a grand total of 15 times not to elect Martin to public office – the most recent attempt being his failed bid for Barack Obama's vacated Illinois Senate seat, a race in which Martin managed to garner a whopping five percent in the primary.

But the "king of the birthers" seems to have finally accepted his fate and learned from his past mistakes. In anticipation of his 2012 presidential run, he has successfully re-crafted his argument, reconstructed his platform and re-packaged his traditionally ignored presence in the national political sphere. In short, he has admitted that the conspiracies about Obama not being born in the United States are illegitimate – even if he hasn't gone so far as to recant his claims that Obama is a Muslim.

"I'm going to have a tremendous impact on the presidential election, not because I'm the frontrunner. Clearly I'm not," he admitted, according to the L.A. Times. "But I'll be driving the agenda in the Republican Party."

Martin doesn't plan to run a strict birther campaign. He plans to run a redefined birther campaign. Acknowledging his change in position since 2004, Martin said he now believes Obama was in fact born in Hawaii. "But," according to news reports, "he believes the White House is blocking the release of the president's full birth certificate because it could contain embarrassing information."

The key term here is "could contain." He's not claiming that President Obama's birth certificate does contain embarrassing information. After failing to convince the American public that Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim Manchurian Candidate bent on destroying the United States by instituting Sharia Law across the nation, Martin is now stepping back and making a more generalized statement about what could be true.

And that is ingenious. He has created an argument that cannot be refuted.

It's like arguing that the world is flat by refuting naysayers who have not personally piloted an aircraft around the globe to verify its alleged spherical shape.

It's like claiming the Holocaust was a hoax because no scientist has yet disproven the theory that Jewish people are born with a genetic disease that makes them keel over dead at the sight of Swastika arm bands.

It's like saying that dinosaurs were on Noah's Ark. Without the evidence, who's to say they weren't?

The reason Martin can make such claims is that the copy made public, and posted on the president's website, is a short-form "certification of birth," not the long-form "birth certificate." The state of Hawaii, Obama's birth place, does not give access to long-form certificates, according to FactCheck.Org, similar to most other states in the union.

Because Martin believes that the officials who verified the authenticity of Obama's original birth certificate are lying, he has therefore opened up the possibility that they are hiding potentially "embarrassing information" from the public.

And that could mean anything.

It could mean Obama was born with webbed feet, that he had extra digits, that he was born with only one eyeball, or that he has an evil twin. Perhaps the real, non-fudged version of the certificate says that Obama's father is actually Frank Marshall Davis, a black activist and alleged Communist, as Martin claimed in 2008.

Or, perhaps the original document reveals that Obama was born at 7:06 PM, instead of the 7:24 PM time listed on the public copy (7:06 is really 6:66 – the mark of the beast and proof that Obama is the anti-Christ).

It sounds ridiculous, but when you establish a frame for an issue that cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed, there is really no way of silencing such insane theories.

If Martin is correct in claiming that he will be "driving the Republican Party's agenda" in 2012, I look forward to an entertaining year – and a landslide victory for Obama.

The Republican Party would be suicidal to run a smear campaign based on some webbed-foot/evil-twin conspiracy theory. That said, I wouldn't put it past 'em.