Liberals are today’s Sadducees who continually crucify truth

Timothy Egan, the New York Times’s “Opinionator,” writes:

It’s easy to see why people think Donald Trump has become the Charlie Sheen of the Republican Party. Gluttons for attention, the two share a rare talent at self-promotion, self-delusion and self-immolation. And Sheen now proclaims himself a birther, in league with Trump’s crusade to promote a lie about President Obama that is also believed by nearly half of G.O.P voters.

In fact, tens of millions of Americans, including half of Republicans, are “birthers”—meaning that they believe (1) that we don’t know the truth about Obama’s birth, and (2) that Obama has concealed it. But because one of those many millions of birthers is the reprehensible Charlie Sheen, Egan would have his readers believe that this makes Trump the equivalent of Sheen and that it discredits birthers generally. What would Egan think if a Republican columnist said that President Obama and all Democrats were the moral equivalent of the worst, sickest, most violent people in the country who happen to vote Democratic?

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Paul K. writes:

Re your entry, “Liberals are today’s Sadducees who continually crucify truth,” Joshua Green, a senior editor of The Atlantic and a weekly political columnist for the Boston Globe, laughs off the questions about Obama’s birth certificate in an article, “What Donald Trump’s Birther Investigators Will Find in Hawaii.” He writes:

Obama was born at the Kapiolani Medical Center, where he (or more likely his mother) was issued a “certificate of live birth,” the cat-nippy phrase that gets the birthers howling at the moon. You can visit the Kapiolani Medical Center. But you can’t obtain a copy of Obama’s certificate of live birth because the Federal Health Information Privacy Act of 1999, which protects medical records from public scrutiny, forbids it. The Obama campaign probably worsened the situation by releasing this copy of a certificate of live birth—worsened it because this is obviously only a copy (printed from a computer) and not the original. So the effect on the birther rumors was like the effect of steroids on Barry Bonds: it made everything bigger and uglier.

But the point is, that’s it. That’s the whole paper trail, all there is to find.

This is so odd. Green writes, “That’s the whole paper trail, all there is to find,” scant sentences after writing, “you can’t obtain a copy of Obama’s certificate of live birth because the Federal Health Information Privacy Act of 1999, which protects medical records from public scrutiny, forbids it.” So in other words, that’s not the whole paper trail, just the part of the paper trail that President Obama is willing to release to the public, yet the reasons for his refusal to do so do not arouse Green’s curiosity whatsoever, not even enough to comment on them.

A common plot device in screwball comedies is to have escalating confusion over some crucial piece of information one character has not not made clear to the others, resulting in all sorts of misunderstandings. We now have the same scenario played out on the political stage as the president refuses to release his birth certificate, his opponents continue to demand to see it, and his supporters stubbornly claim not to even understand what the issue is.

LA to Paul K.:

How about writing a letter or e-mail to Green making these points?

Paul K. replies:

It hadn’t occurred to me to write directly to Green as I wouldn’t expect him to give my letter a thoughtful reply. What I am pointing out is so obvious that I must assume he’s deliberately ignoring it. Anti-birtherism is a new tenet of the Liberal Faith Community, and anyone who gave the questions raised by birthers any credibility would immediately be excommunicated. I’m sure Green’s desire to remain a member in good standing of the LFC outweighs any concerns about his own intellectual inconsistency.

Trump observed that any journalists who got to the bottom of this story would be the new Woodward and Bernstein. Instead, it’s as if when Nixon delared, “I am not a crook,” Woodward and Bernstein said, “That’s the whole truth, that’s all there is to find.”

LA replies:

But Green’s article, plus your commentary on it, would be extremely useful to our side. Birthers should print out a copy of it and carry it with them, and when they encounter someone who rejects the birth issue, they could show it to him, as it perfectly makes two points: first, that there is a problem, namely Obama’s concealment of the birth certificate, which is shown by Green himself though he doesn’t see it; and second, that Green doesn’t see it, even though he himself showed it. That’s the complete picture. The truth—Obama’s concealment of the certificate—is right there, and the anti-birthers are acting as though this truth doesn’t exist and that anyone who believes that it exists is a crazed moron.

I think that many anti-birthers who read Green’s blog entry and your response to it would have their thinking changed.

James P. writes:

Joshua Green writes:

“Obama was born at the Kapiolani Medical Center.”

He’s assuming what he wants to prove!

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 22, 2011 08:27 AM | Send