Maureen Dowd Scores One.

Maureen Dowd's Op-Ed piece in this morning's New York Times hit the nail square on the head. It is aptly entitled "Boy, Oh Boy" and ties the GOP politicians of South Carolina into their total disbelief that a man of bi-racial ancestry is the President of the US. This just really sticks in their craws. It is something I have believed for a long time. The GOP politicians south of the Mason-Dixon Line are the unreconstructed intellectual and moral descendants of slavers and segregationists. Ms. Dowd recites a Litany of the historical Racism of South Carolina. however she fails to point out in this litany that South Carolina on December 20, 1860 was the very first of the Confederate States to attempt secession from the Union. It's the home of John C. Calhoun who first gave birth to the concept of Nullification, the location of Fort Sumter, the home of Strom Thurmond who was the nominee of the Dixiecrats in the 1948 presidential election, the home of Mark Sanford the foremost authority in the world on the Applachian Trail and of Argentine Salsa Romances and the home state of Joe Wilson who lied to America from the historic floor of the House of Representatives about lying and insulted the President in his quest to be the John C. Calhoun of the twenty-first century. She probably also ought to have listed the connections that South Carolina has to bible-thumping racist christianism.

What is going on with the Birthers?

A new phenomenon has been created. It is the Birther 'controversy'. These folks who are part of a species of people I call the Cave Dwellers are people, who despite all contrary evidence believe that President Barack Obama is not entitled to be the President of the U. S. of A because he is not a natural born citizen of the United States as is required by Article Two of the Constitution. These crazy folks believe that he was born of a white woman from the heartland of America and a father from the African nation of Kenya in Kenya. They derive their opinion based on the 'testimony' of an elderly Kenyan woman who claims to be both his step paternal grandmother who also claims to have been present at the birth of Baby Barack in Kenya. They explain away the birth certificate that says he was born in Hawaii and the contemporaneous birth announcements published in Hawaiian newspapers as ancient conspiracies and frauds. They claim a conspiracy the state government of Hawaii's Vital Records and some sort of Muslim plot dating from 1960 to make this baby President of the United States almost fifty years after his birth. Recent polls suggest that this conspiracy theory originated and is most strongly believed in the Old South. Which gives this a decidedly racial basis in the old Confederacy. Almost 53% of good white republican folks in the old Confederate states either believe he is not a citizen but an "illegal alien" or that his 'natural born' citizenship is open to dispute. These folks are not in the reality based community (as Bill Maher calls it) but rather are truly Cave Dwellers.