Posted by silentpadna on 4/28/2011 2:10:00 PM:
1) My point has always been that the racism in this argument is an unsupported assertion. 2) And that this line of political attack is being used because of its expediency. If Obama was not the son of a Kenyan native, had not spent his youth in Indonesia, and all the other (baseless) reasons for this attack, there would be other things the fringe would be targeting instead.
1) And my point has been that calling into question whether a black man is really an American or not is prima facie racist, for all sorts of historical reasons I can provide you with links for if you need them. I do think it's very similar to the distinction between calling Bush "Chimpy", and circulating a picture of Obama and his family as chimps. There's no long, sordid history of trying to dehumanize white people by calling them monkeys. If that's makes for a double standard, well, too bad.
2) But again, saying these things were "expedient" doesn't at all address why they were expedient. Why were these the things that got built up into a lie, and not something else? Just saying, "they were expedient" completely misses the point of why they were perceived to be the quickest route to a smear by the originators of this line of attack.
Posted by silentpadna on 4/28/2011 2:10:00 PM:
This difference between you and me in this is that I do not claim to know the motivations of the people who designed or support the political attack. You, and a host of others seem to know without a shred of proof.
If you're asking me whether there's a distinction between being racist yourself and merely pandering to racists for political gain, well, my response would be to say that's a distinction I don't care to draw.
Basically, to me, your denials of the racism of this seem rooted in an ignorance of history, which would appear to be ridiculous given the Chester Arthur reference you just tossed out. Claiming a black man is not a real American, joking about a black family being monkeys, or (to pick another example) advocating that people must pass a literacy test before they can vote -- all these things are steeped in the ugliest periods of oppession in American history. To me they don't even qualify as "dog whistles". They're far more blatant than that.
More to the point, I really, really doubt that the originators of the birther attacks were ignorant of that history and just happened to hit upon a smear with directly racist connotations by pure accident. Occam's Razor slices that idea to ribbons.