Donald Trump used his full command of media attention and his shameless, stupid pandering to the lowest level of anti-Obama furor to get the world's attention focused on HIM. So much so, and it was beginning to show up in the presidential polls, that Obama felt it was time to throw the red meat to the dogs and release his "long-form" birth certificate.
What does it show that the other certificate didn't? And by the way, the "other one" is what anyone gets when they request a copy of their birth certificate. Obama wasn't hiding anything. He released what you get when you ask for a copy. So now the long form tells us the name of the hospital, and it's signed both by the doctor and by Obama's mother. And it is certified by an official as being authentic.
That should put an end to it. But it won't. Orly Taitz, the crazy "Queen of Birthers," has other thoughts, like: It lists the father's race as "African" rather than "Negro." So Orly wants to know why -- and thinks maybe there's something sinister about that. She says, in the 1960s you wrote "Negro," not "African." That sounds like something you would write today, she says, implying that this was not authentic but just made up today. Which of course would mean that the signatures are forged, because Obama's mother is dead.
The simple fact is that Barack Obama, Sr. WAS FROM AFRICA -- He was African. They don't use the term "negro" as a racial designation in Africa.
Of course, it's all really about the paranoid fear of the Other, the outsider who is going to change our way of life, who is going to take something away from you (guns, money, freedom). And at the bottom it is also about race.
Why else would Trump so facilely shift from the birth issue to the legitimacy of Obama's acceptance to Columbia and Harvard, saying he "wasn't qualified to attend Ivy League schools," and implying he got in . . . how? Affirmative action, perhaps? That's code for racism.
It's all very ugly, disgusting -- and a waste of time.
Ralph
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Bob Schieffer of CBS News agrees. He put it very bluntly, telling Katie Curic today that Donald Trump is peddling racism in questioning Obama's qualifications for getting in Columbia and Harvard. "That's just code for saying he got into law school because he's black. This is an ugly strain of racism that's running through this whole thing."
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