Everyone's pointing to this morsel from today's New York Times piece about the GOP presidential field and its voters:
A plurality of Republican voters, 47 percent, said they believed Mr. Obama, who was born in Hawaii, was born in another country; 22 percent said they did not know where he was born, and 32 percent said they believed he was born in the United States.
But I think it's long past time we stopped acting surprised or baffled or aghast. I'm far from the first one to share this reading, but I think the people who "believe" the President was born outside the United States are just simply using that shibboleth to register their dissatisfaction with having an Other as Commander-in-Chief. Most of them don't feel comfortable running around yelling "He can't be President -- he's
black!" so they simply substitute muslim or foreign-born. And that's why they find Obama's nefariousness to be so self-evident; and the refusal from the rest of us to look at them with anything but derisive grins and muted horror so enraging. They
know without knowing that he's up to something, because they only need to look skin deep.
(cross-posted at eliaisquire.com)