The FREEPERS frequently do some funny stuff (as well as some frankly scary stuff), but a diary this evening struck me, at the end of a fairly unique week, as much funnier than even their normal funny diaries. (And please note, they almost never do anything that's INTENTIONALLY funny -- just funny at their own expense.)
Allegedly, after questions about whether he was really born in the United States, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has released his long-form Louisiana birth certificate. (I will note that the fact that the thread has been locked MAY mean that the powers that be at FREEP think this is a hoax initiated by somebody on our side. I can only note that if it was, I didn't do it, don't have any idea of who did it, but can only express my admiration for the person who did it.)
Governor Jindal has become a favorite of certain elements of the Republican Party, who seem convinced that the only reason Barack Obama is President today is that he's not exactly white, but not all THAT black, and is therefore perfectly situated to get the votes of both people of color and whites who wouldn't vote for somebody who is REALLY black. It can't possible have had anything to do with the fact that he's one of the smartest people I've seen in national politics, or that he's a great communicator, or that he built an amazing organization. It can't possibly be any of those things because, to many of these people, everything is about race, and only secondarily about anything else.
But the Jindal boomlet (never mind that he's ... um ... to be charitable, NOT exactly a great -- or even very good -- communicator), brings two principles of the modern Republican Party into direct conflict:
1. The principle that they want to win above everything else, even at the cost of putting a few token non-whites in positions of visibility (such as giving seemingly every non-white at their conventions a speaking role on the platform and making Michael Steele RNC Chairman); and
2. The principle that, whatever it was at its birth, the modern Republican Party is essentially the pure white Dixiecrats gone national.
The result is this hilarious (if abbreviated) thread.
The birth certificate means Bobby Jindal can be President (at least if "natural born citizen" means somebody who is a citizen at birth, as pretty much every rational person I know think it does). But that means that, horror of horrors, President Obama is a natural born citizen, and qualified to be President. And that would conflict with the new birther meme that you've got to be born here to TWO American citizens, and that if one of your parents wasn't yet a citizen at the time of your birth, well, you couldn't POSSIBLY be a real, natural-born citizen. Of course, to the people taking this position, Jindal would probably be disqualified simply because he doesn't look white (at least white enough) to them.
I love the fact that their own racism and xenophobia may be screwing them out of one of their own (even if not this year) Presidential possibilities. It certainly demonstrates that anybody who wasn't descended on all sides of their family from immigrants to Colonial America isn't fully tuned in to what the modern Republican Party is all about.