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| (Image by unicorns.com) |
Yes, you read that right. Is Romney not a human but rather a unicorn and therefore not qualified to run for president?
Sounds
ridiculous. Obviously. A liberal group has engaged in an absurd attempt
at questioning Romney’s qualifications solely to make a point – if the
questions about President Obama’s birth certificate linger in such a
bizarre way that he faced losing his spot on the Arizona ballot, why not
wryly attempt to make an issue of whether Romney is a person? Not a
corporation, a human.
The Arizona secretary of state recently
launched yet another investigation into Obama’s possible Kenyan
citizenship based on, he said, 1,200 Arizona voters who signed a
petition seeking such a probe. The infamous Maricopa County Sheriff Joe
Arpaio lent a hand by pulling cops off the beat to travel to Hawaii,
Obama’s birthplace, to do some detective work at Arizona taxpayers’
expense.
The result? They concluded Obama is a citizen who was born in Hawaii.
After
that fiasco, a Democratic consultant, John Hlinko, created an online
petition group, LeftAction, that collected 18,000 signatures asking
Arizona officials to determine if Romney, in fact, is a fraud – a
unicorn. The petitions demanded that the same Arizona secretary of
state, Ken Bennett, the Romney campaign’s Arizona co-chair, determine if
the Republican nominee is not a mythical equine before placing his name
on the November ballot.
Hey, you’ve got to rule these things out, right?
“There
has never been a conclusive DNA test proving that Mitt Romney is not a
unicorn,” the group said. “And if Mitt Romney is or may be a unicorn, he
is not constitutionally qualified to be president.”
The
tongue-in-cheek aspect of this charade may be lost on some voters, but
the thinking behind it goes something like this:
If the birther
conspiracy theory is correct, Anna Dunham, pregnant and about to become
an 18-year-old single mom, decided in 1961 to take a long, expensive
flight from Hawaii to one of the poorest countries on earth, Kenya,
where archaic medical services presented numerous possible complications
for her baby’s birth. And why? To please the husband that her family
had shunned, and who soon left her to raise their child on her own.
Birth announcements were phoned in at huge expense by Dunham to two
Hawaii newspapers to make it appear that baby Barack was born in
America. And the reason? At a time when blacks widely suffered from
segregation, and intimidation prevented them from voting in portions of
the South, this teenage woman decided that her black baby would one day
become president of the United States.
Sounds ridiculous. But there are levels of absurdity, and Hlinko is pushing absurd notions to the extreme to make a point.
Meanwhile,
the craziness has taken on a bipartisan bent. Some of the same birthers
who won’t let go of the assertion that Obama is a Kenyan have now set
their sights on Romney. It’s only a matter of time until these inquiries
make their way across the Web and into millions of emails.
These
birthers question whether Romney’s father, who was born in Mexico, may
have been an illegal alien. Not a space alien – that’s for the National
Enquirer to decide. Because some of George Romney’s family remained in
Mexico for years, the conspiracy theorists wonder if Mitt Romney was
actually born south of the border. Others question whether Willard Mitt
Romney is his real name.
Hey, let’s see the birth certificate.
No
doubt, a fake Romney birth certificate will surface on the Web at some
point. Some tech savvy commentators or CEOs have warned that the
Internet and email can be a cesspool -- no more reliable than writings
on a bathroom wall. Critics say the web has brought us the Age of
Misinformation.
David and Barbara Mikkelson, who operate the
fact-checking, myth-busting site known as snopes.com, have concluded
that people are rather cavalier about their facts. The California couple
is not particularly political, and they don’t relish taking on all the
nonsense written online about politics. They see a cyber world in which
both ardent liberals and conservatives reject the nuance of public
policy and facts that contradict one’s point of view.
“Especially
in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but
people just want things to be true or false,” David Mikkelson told the
New York Times in 2010.
Anyone who has read the message boards on
websites knows that the anonymous format invites crackpot conspiracies.
People are willing to say the most hurtful, nonsensical things on the
Internet, comments they would never put forth face-to-face.
For
whatever reason, these people have a special place in their hateful
hearts for Obama. And the online comments and chain-emails they create
are often based on information that is made up, or based on the
flimsiest of evidence.
One of my favorite examples of this
delusional approach to “reporting” occurred when a caller to a
right-wing talk-radio show alleged that Obama planned to deny emergency
brain surgery for patients over 70. The caller claimed to be a brain
surgeon and said he gained his information from a meeting of two
associations of neurological surgeons.
None of that was true, but it didn’t stop certain tactless types from spreading the canard in emails that went viral.
The
tin-foil hat crowd is delighted that they now have a global stage from
which to spew their vicious bile. They don’t need broadband or a smart
phone to discern the facts. They apparently absorb their vibes through
their low-tech head gear.
Birthers say it would be a catastrophe
if it was discovered after the 2012 vote that America had given four
more years to a fraudulent president who does not qualify for the
highest office in the land. What if the proof surfaces after the
November election?
Some would argue that the same could be said if
Romney wins in the fall election and then a horn starts protruding from
his skull.
Our first cartoon character president?
Maybe that’s just what we deserve.
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