Stovepiping Teh Wacky™

Via DailyBanter.com:

Sadly, I have to agree with Zandar Versus The Stupid: the Republicans now openly and deliberately promote birther conspiracy. For those of you who missed Cheney’s virtuoso play to the fringe, here it is:

Cheney backs away from birtherism when pressed. But she doesn’t debunk it; indeed, she actively tries to insinuate her neocon message into the birther nonsense with scare-words:

“People are fundamentally uncomfortable, and they’re fundamentally increasingly uncomfortable with an American president who seems to be afraid to defend America…The kind of thing you saw on this video is indicative of sort of a general feeling of discomfort.”

Ben Smith of Politico.com followed up with Cheney, who stayed on message with the same scary language and passive denial:

I don’t have any question about Barack Obama’s right to be President of the United States.

My concern is with his policies. I am deeply troubled about the path he is taking this country down — massively expanding the size of government, weakening our national defenses, increasing taxes on all Americans and nationalizing health care. These are dangerous policies for the nation.

Troubled, dangerous, weak, afraid, and…oh, yeah, foreign. These are dog whistles for wacknuts and Liz Cheney knows it. And it’s not the first time she has played to the fringe:

Never one to be left out, Rush Limbaugh has gotten into the act: “Barack Obama has yet to have to prove that he’s a citizen. All he has to do is show a birth certificate. He has yet to have to prove he’s a citizen.” Listen:

As I’ve written before, Limbaugh had a bad experience with the fringe in the late 1990s when he refused to air Vince Foster conspiracy theories. The lesson he took from those dark days of MonicaGate is to never again be out-fringed by his rivals on right-wing radio. He knows exactly what he’s doing with a comment like this: earning notice on birther website WorldNetDaily and credibility with the credulous.

Birtherism is just one part of a larger campaign to whip up fringe sentiment and stovepipe racist nonsense. Via Oliver Willis, listen as Glenn Beck connects health care reform to slavery reparations:

Obama has always sidestepped divisive issues, like reparations, by channeling the impetus for them into more general reform. A public option would help black Americans, as it would necessarily help white/ brown/ yellow/ red Americans, too. But Beck twists that appeal until it is unrecognizable, inculcating the zero-sum thinking of racial politics into his audience: a victory for blacks is a blow against whites. White people should oppose reform because it helps black people.

Birtherism invites all the ugliness of race and red-baiting into political discussion. Far from being an extreme idea of a rare fringe, birtherism is the stovepipe by which the right seeks to inject that ugliness into the public discussion.

Maddow invited David Weigel onto her show last night to attempt a corrective. It’s good, but incomplete, beginning about the 2:40 mark:

Weigel should know exactly what the Lou Dobbses of the media want. By channeling birtherism, they promote fringe thinking into the mainstream. By questioning the legitimacy of a popular president, they undermine his agenda. The Republican House bill is just a stovepipe; the credulous talk from Dobbs is just a stovepipe. The purpose is to create a nontroversy that simply will not die.

For no matter what the State of Hawaii does, and no matter how often Obama’s birth certificate is reexamined, birtherism will not go away. The whole point of birtherism is to NOT find final proof — of anything. The point is to continue doubting and to spread that doubt in mainstream culture.

They want to derail progressive change, and don’t care how many ignoble lies they must tell. Or how often they must repeat them.