Nate Silver did a post about how birtherism is getting more mainstream attention (and approval) than trutherism ever did, citing statistics to prove his point. One commenter argued that trutherism is more offensive, because it trivializes the deaths of thousands and their living relatives, whereas the only person the birthers could offend is Obama's dead mother.
This is clearly fallacious reasoning, but it points to an important realization: most of us find the whole birther phenomenon rather scary, and not just because of its mainstreaming and wide acceptance. The 9/11 conspiracy theories are silly, paranoid, overwrought, even offensive, but I don't find them anywhere near as disturbing, and I don't think I would even if they enjoyed as much publicity as the birthers.
Below the fold, I explain the primary reasons why birtherism is not only disturbing but dangerous.
For starters, birtherism, unlike trutherism, has distinct racial overtones. While there are anti-Semitic versions of trutherism, it is mostly a paranoid fantasy about government corruption (which does exist, and can lead to the deaths of many, as in the Iraq War). It is therefore nowhere near as offensive as the thinly disguised racism of the birthers who depict the first black president as scary and un-American.
More importantly, the whole tone of the birther movement is one of murderous hatred to the point of fomenting insurrection. Look again at the unbelievable rant by Alan Keyes (the token African American in the movement, whose motives I would rather not speculate about) from a few months ago:
Keyes here openly calls for the military to refuse to obey the President's orders, and he says that Obama must be "stopped" or it will be the end of the United States. In my opinion, and it pains me to say this, he comes perilously close to encouraging assassination. I could be reading him wrong--perhaps he really believes litigation stands a chance of succeeding--but since he never makes clear that he only supports nonviolent resistance, his words go beyond being simply dangerously irresponsible.
Most of the prominent birthers are not as explicit about their intentions as Keyes, but the overtones are found throughout the entire movement. The rhetoric of the prominent truthers, in contrast, while hysterical and over-the top, is not usually tinged with that subtle or not-so-subtle appeal to violent overthrow of the government. Of course, it isn't just the birthers who are giving off these vibes: many on the right, including the FOX commentators who have recently attempted to distance themselves from the birthers, sound like this. What, after all, does a tea party evoke?
The current spin on FOX is that the birthers are a media-manufactured creation propping up a minor group of extremists--"the three remaining Klanners," as Ann Coulter put it--to make the right look bad. But this is clearly not the case. When the majority of Republicans have doubts that Obama was born in the United States, and when these doubts are echoed by a pundit for a mainstream cable news network, not to mention a hugely successful radio talk-show host who has been dubbed the unofficial "leader" of the GOP, you know it has gone way too far.
James Von Brunn, the shooter at the Holocaust Museum who took the life of a black man, is a birther. As Ta-Nehisi Coates suggested the other day, "The worry isn't that Obama will get killed--it's that a lot of other people will get killed because these thugs can't get to Obama."
We Democrats may enjoy the spectacle of seeing the GOP marginalized by the birthers, but they are nonetheless scary, and the threat posed by them should not be trivialized.