Let’s Put the Birther Issue Aside, Once and for All

Along with the people over at Free Republic, Joseph Farah was one of the primary forces upholding conservatism throughout the wilderness of the Clinton years. Having said that, at times he has pushed some pretty flaky stuff. What do you do with a man like this? Based upon his years of stalwart conservative advocacy, I would not for a second throw him under the bus simply because he sometimes drinks Kool-Aid (and yes, drinking Kool-Aid is not just a liberal phenomenon). At the same time, he should not be above reproof. It was wrong for him–for many, many reasons–to bring up the Birther issue at the Tea Party convention. For one, not everyone there agrees with him or thinks that the issue should be pursued. However, given his stature, by bringing up the issue at this venue, he associates everyone in the Tea Party movement with Birtherism. If Farah wants Birtherism to be the prime focus of the 2010 and 2012 elections, then he should raise his own money and have a Birther convention, or something. However, the Tea Party movement has never been about Birtherism, and so it was wrong to bring it up as though it were.
At the same time, some conservative political operatives, who have ample supplies of Kool-Aid of their own, said on Twitter, “If Sarah Palin does not denounce Farah in her keynote speech, shame on her!”
Well, shame on you! So someone says something somewhere that is reprehensible and automatically Sarah Palin has to denounce them, or she should be shamed? Palin therefore must spend her life apologizing for and denouncing the statements of others who have no connection to her? Wow! What a burden she must bear! One would think that she was the Pope, or Jimmy Carter on one of his apology tours.
When I challenged these conservative Kool-Aid drinking monkeys on this point, their pathetic excuse was that if Al Gore had been at a convention with a Truther, they would demand the same degree of contrition on his part.
Now, really! Both Gore and Obama hang with Truthers on a regular basis, and have done so for an eternity. Where have these Beltway mavens been hiding their heads all of their years? It was certainly not in the sand!
But this is not about Truthers, or political operatives who would hold Palin to a higher standard than they would hold Gore or the President. This is about Farah and the Birthers.
I was glad that Palin did not bring the issue up, because the real issues are much bigger than the President’s birth certificate. Farah’s speech needed to be dealt with, but not from the podium in a keynote address. It needed to be dealt with in the hall. Which is exactly what Andrew Breibart did when he confronted Farah. The full story can be found here. However, in many ways, Ed Morrissey’s summary really encapsulates what the Birther issue has become, and why conservatives need to put the issue aside, once and for all:

Obama … released the Certification of Live Birth in June 2008 …  That may have been the first time a Presidential candidate has ever done so, and the COLB is a document that could get Obama a passport, a driver’s license, and a Social Security number.  It’s all the legal proof required.  If that wasn’t enough, Obama’s political opponents found contemporaneous records of his birth in the Honolulu Advertiser from August 1961.

The wins in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts over the last three months did not come from people questioning Obama’s birthplace.  They resulted from grassroots opposition to the Obama-Nancy Pelosi policy agenda.  Scott Brown won the seat held by the Kennedys and their cronies for almost 60 years by pushing back hard against ObamaCare and the counterterrorism policies of the White House.  If anything, the continued focus on Birtherism at these rallies undercuts the mainstream nature of the opposition to the Democratic agenda and allows the media to paint it as a paranoid mob obsessed with conspiracy theories.  Not only is it not a winning issue, it will hang like an albatross around the necks of conservatives who tacitly or expressly link themselves to it.

The American public rejected the birth-certificate argument in November 2008.  We now have much better and more rational arguments to make against Obama and his allies in Congress.  Let’s stay focused on those issues, where we have much stronger footing with a disillusioned electorate.

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