"One nation under Gawd..."

Rick Sanchez on CNN this afternoon covered this story about the "birthers" taking over a town hall meeting in Delaware. The gist of Sanchez' commentary was to ask what President Obama has to do to show that he is a natural born citizen. The obligatory couplet of partisan strategists were on the show and the Republican guy said that while he the strategist believes Obama was born in Hawaii, Obama still "needs" to prove he is a citizen to all these idiots in the hinterlands by "communicating, because he is such a great communicator (he said smugly), with a press conference, or something."

Watch the video, and I'll comment below.

My question: Why does Obama "need" to do anything more? He's provided his birth certificate, signed and sealed. He has also shown the newspaper from that week announcing his birth. Why does he "need" to do more?

These dunderheads would never vote for him anyway, and they would never sign onto any of his programs, or even try to understand his motivations. In fact, look at the video and see this Representative Castle, who most likely is a rational well-meaning public servant, flail about and finally surrender his meeting to the morons who cheered the flag and jeered the President. Castle must be thinking, Geez, I gotta pander to these muttonheads to keep my job? There's gotta be a better way to serve my community.

This video is one for the ages, folks. It shows all the irrationality of our modern body politic rolled into a few short minutes: we have the "birther" inanity, the flag fetish, the invocation of WW2, the jeering, even the emphasis of 'under Gawd' in the Pledge of Allegiance... hard to believe we're 400 years out from the Age of Enlightenment; it's like a scene from the Auto-de fe.

Also, in the video, watch the panel of folks look back at Representative Castle once the lady gets going. The look of bewilderment, like, what the hell are we going to do here? Also remarkable, in addition to the shaking emotion of the lady crying "I want my country back", are the loud cheers of approval from her fellow citizens. The hatred is palpable.

Scary stuff. I give Obama a lot of credit for his committment, even if I may have differences of opinion on certain policies. These people are nuts. I'm sure I couldn't be their president, I'm sure I couldn't do it.

Furthermore, I would think the onus is on the GOP to educate their own electorate. This has all the makings of a slow-motion train wreck with 10 or 15% of their voters going off the reservation in the next election cycle: Maybe start a 3rd Party with Sarah Palin as the candidate, and drain off any hope for a Republican win. I doubt Obama or the Democrats want to go to any length to stop this process.

When your opponent is running off the cliff, the smartest thing you can do is get out of the way.

There's more video and discussion at Think Progress.