Poe's law
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Feb. 6th, 2012 | 01:54 pm
mood: 
amused
From the "surely-you-can't-be-serious department"... it's probably a well-known fact that birthers are batshit insane, but even I didn't expect them to be THIS insane:
On Friday, February 3, 2012 the death knell of America the Beautiful tolled across the fifty states and around the world. An administrative judge in the state of Georgia rewrote the Constitution and ruled in favor of putative president Barack Hussein Obama declaring him a Natural Born Citizen and eligible to be on their state ballot. Our rule of law is no more. Our Constitution is no more. Obama, Soros, state media, activist judges and all the ‘powers that be’ of a New World Order sealed our fate. The United States is a land of liberty no more.
You'd think that this whiny, hand-wringing concoction of quacking fruitloopery and turgid pomp is the work of an exaggerating parodist, perhaps a writer for The Onion, that nobody could REALLY write this in earnest — but you'd be wrong.
They're serious. And don't call them Shirley.
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from:
schnee
date: Feb. 6th, 2012 07:39 pm (UTC)
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I often think that it's quite sad that people like these regularly constitute the public face of the USA; not just birthers specifically, but insane people in general, like (say) the homophobes. Some homophobia is probably to be expected, and as long as it's just Phelps and his extended family, you can pretty much ignore it as the rants of an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing, but it actually seems much more widespread. Stories such as this one from the Rolling Stone are quite telling: it's easy to think that all the USA's an open and tolerant melting pot that embraces differences, but there's many people that are worryingly narrowminded and hateful.
Which isn't to say that all the USA is like that, BTW, and that's just my point — I think the decent folks outnumber the hateful ones, probably by large amount, but the latter are still abundant enough to make the news; they're not just a few idiots that literally everybody else is embarassed about, they're a major part of society. It would be unthinkable for anyone, especially a politician, to be openly racist in the USA, yet open and virulent homophobia is far from uncommon, to the point where one of the two major parties is largely homophobic (to varying extents).
For someone like me who's watching this from the outside, there's no real difference between (existing) open and widespread homophobia and (hypothetical) open and widespread racism, though. And the same's true for others, and it shapes the way that the USA is seen — and then I always think that I feel sorry for all the decent people who do exist and who're usually forgotten.
I really think the USA (in terms of society and population, not necessarily the conduct of the government) are a better country than they're often given credit for.
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from:
redlemon
date: Feb. 6th, 2012 10:00 pm (UTC)
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And as for our government, it's sad to see how complacent we really are if we let some of these fools into office. Or what criteria we use for voting. Or, heck, what government seats are fraudulently obtained.
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from:
schnee
date: Feb. 6th, 2012 10:34 pm (UTC)
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