Thursday, January 7, 2010

Government Agencies Visit "Birthers"? If So, To Intimidate?

I was reading an article from Mother Jones discussing the Secret Service placing some of their attention on the "birther" movement, or those who question Obama's actual birthplace of Hawaii, believing the President to be a Kenyan citizen instead. According to the article, several anti-Obama people have come forward claiming to have been visited by the government, including Dr. Orly Taitz, the dentist/lawyer, who seems to head the movement. "A number of my supporters had visits from Secret Service, from different agencies, INS, Homeland Security. There are a whole number of people who got these visits to intimidate and harass them," Taitz had said, including herself, but she was not home at the moment federal agents arrived.

One thing got me to question Taitz's statement, and that is the INS no longer exists. I have no doubts that the government is visiting this fringe element of the conservatives, who have been trying to prove to no avail that the President cannot be our President, but I doubt they are harassing these people, and I would argue that these people are exaggerating their experiences to establish themselves as some sort of conservative martyr. They are simply doing their duty in protecting the president. I guess I can look at the situation through these people's eyes - they believe Obama is not president, and now his thugs are coming to find out what kind of threat they are.

Some "birthers" do see the situation correctly, minus their assertion about the president's birthplace. Carl Swensson, a shopkeeper in Georgia filed a complaint to the U.S. attorney for the Northern District in Georgia, following a previous attempt by fellow "birther" Walter Fitzpatrick II, saying that the secret service agents "were doing their job. They were professional. They tried to dissuade me from what I was doing, but I wasn't going to have anything to do with that."

It is no surprise that these people are being looked at by the secret service, especially when they are commonly espousing such rhetoric as to take arms against the government, which is exactly what Orly Taitz had said in previous calls to anti-Obama supporters.

To the secret service agents, I just say keep up the good work. Even during the Bush administration, I was weary of very vocal people from the left who had extreme criticisms of the president, and despite their freedom of speech, I also saw their language as a red flag. I also see such extreme positions as dividing any kind of opposition movement. If the GOP wanted to rally against the Democrats, they could have been very successful, but now they have to please the fringe, or the fringe will run their own candidates, essentially handing over a win to the Democrats. They are drowning out reasonable conservative opinions for ones based on lies.

3 comments:

  1. Kevin, there is a big difference. On the left, we had our wing-nut fringe during the Bush days, who based some criticisms of him on lies, but they were a fringe. The vast majority on the left based their criticisms of him on carefully researched facts. Today the right wing-nut fringe, that base their criticism of Obama on lies, has become the mainstream, echoed even on the floor of the US House and Senate.

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  2. I was in a hurry to get to work so I threw that one up there real quick. I guess I failed to expand on the difference between the fringe element and the rest...

    The criticisms from the left against the Bush administration, involving torture, wiretapping, etc., I fully agree with, but some of the more outlandish calls against him were just as bad as the calls from the tea party protesters.

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  3. Thanks Keven. The list of crimes in which he and his underlings participated is almost as long as the list of damage they caused through sheer incompetence. But I agree that we had a few tin foil hats on our side.

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