Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Dept. of Inevitability: Limbaugh Joins Birthers

Nashville Scene

A thousand bells in a thousand loony church towers are ringing:
Top-rated radio host Rush Limbaugh, upset that he's forced to report his every movement to tax authorities, blasted President Obama for failing to prove he is natural-born citizen of the United States..."Barack Obama has yet to have to prove that he's a citizen. All he has to do is show a birth certificate. He has yet to have to prove he's a citizen. I have to show them 14 different ways where the h--- I am every day of the year for three years."

This may seem like the perfect moment for some sort of Told ya they're all crazy! liberal back-slapping. Awesome, the pill-popping, thrice-divorced, presumptive leader of the Republican party is one of them! But mostly this just makes me sad.

I had coffee with Bill Phillips, Bill Purcell's former deputy mayor, and he went out of his way to explain to me (a 26-year-old whom he, probably correctly, assumed had a warped view of conservatives) that he was one of those "good Republicans," not the crazies who seem to be running the show these days.

Phillips, it goes without saying, is a smart guy. And eminently reasonable. But because of people like Rep. Marsha Blackburn and the C Street Gang and Limbaugh, Phillips now feels it necessary to qualify his political affiliation. Beliefs that, I'm assuming here, have been shaped and formed by decades of experience in politics and civic life now require a preface because a bunch of assholes think the majority of this country unknowingly voted a Kenyan into the White House.

Maybe that's good for a certain number of Democrats in the short-term. But I don't think it's a stretch to say that this birther movement, now seemingly strengthened by the support of "Paris Hilton without the sex videos," is bad for everyone in the long haul.

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