Slashdot Mirror
The Internet's New Alternate Reality
Hugh Pickens writes "Tim Rutten writes in the LA Times that when President Obama released his long form birth certificate last week, one of the striking things about the reaction to the president's calm and — to reasonable minds — entirely persuasive appearance in the White House briefing room Wednesday was the rapidity and ease with which so many leading birthers rejected the evidence he presented. 'Until very recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined a charge and found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes — dropped,' writes Rutten. 'Today, the growth of the Internet has drained the noun "news" of its former authority. If you don't like the facts presented on the sites of established news organizations, you simply keep clicking until you find one whose "facts" accord with your beliefs.'"
People find the facts they want to and then stop. This is so ground-breaking (*cough*) that it shouldn't be classed as "news" either.
What's more worrying is what people bother to dig ABOUT. People seriously sat down on a fact-finding mission (no matter how contrived) off their own backs to prove their president wasn't American (and, hey America, what happened to all men created equal when it comes to who can be president? Or does that "rule" only apply if you're American, born in America, never set foot outside the borders?).
Meanwhile, they are still running a torture / concentration camp in a foreign country TEN YEARS after a terrorist incident which most inmates can't be linked to (if the US even wanted to bother to put them to trial), to the disgust of almost every nation except themselves. But please, continue arguing about whether his birth certificate is fake or not, not whether he's condoning torture of untested innocents via a supposed legal loophole.
Anybody who cares about someone's opinion of whether he is American or not really needs to get out in the real world a little and find something called "an issue worth debating".
You have a false dichotomy between "birtherism" and "trutherism." "Trutherism" isn't a real movement because they don't care about the truth; It's all about the fishing expedition you describe to get as much dirt on the other side. Really, they're all a waste of time until one side uses it to slander his opponent.
"Birtherism" is just a name for a bunch of idiots to rail against everything: "socialism," homosexuality, etc. There is a valid argument that McCain wasn't native-born (since he was born in the Panama Canal Zone to active-duty parents), but there was no one seriously doubting it. In fact, in the 2008 elections, people even discussed amending the law so that there would be no question McCain qualified to be president. That's not the same as the nutjobs who still think Obama was born in Kenya, Indonesia, or somewhere else. Nearly every single Republican candidate believes in "birtherism," and one uses it as his entire platform. There is a huge percentage of the population who still think that Obama wasn't born in the US, either due to racism or stupidity.
Let's face it, Republicans are idiots. In the 2000 primaries, there were rumors swirling that John McCain fathered a black baby (he adopted a Bangladeshi girl from an orphanage run by Mother Theresa). Others accused him of abandoning the veterans (while no one complained that Bush was never deployed to Vietnam.) You have to be stupid not to believe the Bush-Rove machine was behind these attacks. And you know what? People believed it. The same thing happened four years later, when a well-connected Texas group started to air ads that accused John Kerry (another Vietnam POW) of questioning whether he actually deserved his Purple Hearts and other awards. Bush and Trump, who are both from very rich families, avoided the draft. Clinton did the same, but had a Senator help him.