New Rule: The Republican Leadership in America Must Produce Their Birth Certificates

New Rule: The Republican leadership in America must produce their birth certificates! Not because I doubt they're Americans, I just want to make sure they're not eight-years-old. I mention this because a major talking point on Fox News and hate radio these days is that, after a year and a half of Obama, it's time to bring the "adults" back into power, so they can rein in our deficit, defeat terrorism, and focus on America's real enemy: cleaning ladies in Arizona. But I must protest the premise, because conservatives are the ones who tend to believe in magical ideas, like: America is never wrong; you can defeat terrorism militarily; and lower taxes will somehow fix the deficit. And I'm not even mentioning the stuff about how Jesus used to fly around on a pterodactyl and just hated it when homos ate wedding cake.

Now, am I saying there are no adults in today's Republican Party? Absolutely not, there are -- but like a lot of parents today, the adults let their kids cow them. And silence them. And rule over them. Rush Limbaugh is a child, a primal scream of a man, but he gets his way because he's the fat bully on the playground; and Glenn Beck is the weepy kid who's always crying because he's insane and you don't know what he's going to do and who he's going to take with him.

For example: to solve our debt crisis, a bunch of Republican senators suggested a bipartisan debt commission, which is the adult thing to do. But when Obama agreed to it, immediately seven of them said no -- now they're against it. Because Obama has cooties. Democrats have cooties, so you can't vote with them, or work with them, and compromise is treason. Compare this to England, where they just had an election two weeks ago and, power changed hands -- but the party that lost is working WITH the part that won -- they are not accusing them of being Bolshevik Zulus out to destroy the Magna Carta. Because the English are grown ups, including their conservatives who enjoy a wonderful luxury that conservatives on this side of the pond do not. They're allowed to be sane. They don't have to pander to creationists and anti-intellectuals. Only in this dumb country do liberals and conservatives argue over things like "evolution" and "climate change" and whether "sick people should be left to die in the street."

The conservative who won in England, David Cameron, was asked if he's religious, and he said, "I don't feel I have a direct line." That's right, he distanced himself from God. If Obama did that we wouldn't see him again until neighbors called the cops about the smell. Conservatives in England don't care about the 3 Gs -- God, guns and gays -- that tilt so many elections in America. And they don't get their policy ideas from TV shows, like 24. You never hear a Brit say, "I'm for torture because it worked on The Avengers."

The Washington Post said David Cameron won by running as a sort of "anti-Sarah Palin." Let those words settle in: "anti-Sarah Palin." They feel so good coming out of my mouth it's like I bit into a refreshing burst of civilization.

Finally, one hallmark of not being adult is a tendency to exaggerate. Like this week when Newt Gingrich said "the Obama administration represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did." Which is basically saying Obama is a billion times worse than any president ever! No, he's infinity times worse!

And it made me think: were we this deranged when Bush was in office? I don't think so -- and Bush merited it: We once did a sketch on this show where we sold George Bush fuck-up collector plates, which included: starting and mismanaging the Iraq War, not catching Bin Laden, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, transforming a budgetary surplus into a giant debt, not doing anything about global warming, sitting on his ass on 9/11, outing Valerie Plame, firing federal prosecutors for political reasons, nominating Harriet Miers, Terri Schiavo, trying to sell the ports to the Arabs...I mean, giant, tangible horrific fuckups that Obama could never equal.

Although with the way he's solving this oil spill, he's off to a good start.

'Birthers' must be stopped

No matter how dumb, the people who are questioning whether Obama was born in the U.S. could eventually cause real problems.

By Bill Maher
July 31, 2009

Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group of losers to ruin everything.

For the last couple of weeks, we've all been laughing heartily at the wacky antics of the "birthers" -- the far-right goofballs who claim Barack Obama wasn't really born in Hawaii and therefore the job of president goes to the runner-up, former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

Also, when Obama was sworn in as president, he forgot to give his answer in the form of a question.

And yet, every week, the chorus of conservatives demanding to see his birth certificate grows. It's like they're the Cambridge police, Obama's in his house -- the White House -- and they need to see some ID.

And there's nothing anyone can do to convince these folks. You could hand them, in person, the original birth certificate and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background ... and they still wouldn't believe it.

Which raises the question: Why, in this country, is it always the religious right that won't take anything on faith?

So far, the reaction from Democrats is to laugh this off, and I understand why. If you seriously believe that President Obama is an African sleeper spy, get out of your chat room and have your house tested for lead.

But we live in America, and in America, if you don't immediately kill arrant nonsense, no matter how ridiculous, it can grow and thrive and eventually take over, like crab grass or reality shows about fat people.

This flap might be a deluded right-wing obsession that is a total waste of time, but so was Whitewater, and look where that ended up. A handful of Republican operatives, enraged at Bill Clinton's unprecedented economic growth and budget surpluses, found a woman named Paula Jones, which led to a woman named Monica Lewinsky, which gave me enough material to eventually be able to buy a big house in Bel-Air. Which I'm still conflicted about.

More recently we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, in which Kerry was accused of volunteering to serve in Vietnam so he could jump in front of a bullet so he could get a medal and then throw it away to satisfy his urge to insult real Americans. This was so stupid that Kerry refused to even discuss it.

And we all know how well that worked out.

And once these stories get out there, they're hard to stamp out because our media do such a lousy job of speaking truth to stupid. Vietnam, Iraq and the Spanish-American War were all sold on lies that were unchallenged or even abetted by the media. Clinton got impeached and Kerry got destroyed in large part because the media didn't have the guts to say, "This is nonsense."

Lou Dobbs has been saying recently that people are asking a lot of questions about the birth certificate. Yes, the same people who want to know where the sun goes at night.

And Lou, you're their new king.

That's why it's so important that we the few, the proud, the reality-based attack this stuff before it has a chance to fester and spread. This isn't a case of Democrats versus Republicans. It's sentient beings versus the lizard people, and it is to them I offer this deal: I'll show you Obama's birth certificate when you show me Sarah Palin's high school diploma.

Los Angeles Times Op-Ed July 31,2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-maher31-2009jul31,0,622151.story