Keith Olbermann on "The Carnival Barkers" and their Permanent Scandal Machine

Keith Olbermann (FOK NEWS):

It is another reflection of our well-meaning but sometimes utterly tone-deaf President that he really dug up the long-form birth certificate – even after the previous one had been released, even after the Hawaii historians confirmed that 1961 newspaper birth announcements came only from hospitals, even after the looney-tunes World Net Daily had published (then suppressed) its own article confirming all the released documents were legit – dug it up and today released it and believed the distraction of the “carnival barkers” would vanish.

They’re carnival barkers. They don’t stop selling tickets just because there isn’t a real mermaid back there. If you prove there’s no mermaid, tomorrow they’ll tell you there’s a Martian.

(SNIP)

This is because the debate has never been about whether or not Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. The debate has been about whether the Republicans could or can do by rumor, innuendo, and Fox Propaganda, what they cannot do by the ballot: find the overarching “scandal” with which to beat a Democratic President. With Bill Clinton it was misconduct, sexual and legal, that made him look like a saint by contrast to the average Republican criticizing him (I’m looking at you, Newt – and all the mini-Newts). With Barack Obama it is anything, anything, anything at all, that will reinforce the idea that he is the dangerous other/terrorist/alien/menace/anti-christ that they can investigate and investigate and investigate, without any of them realizing that their racism – or any of a dozen lesser prejudices – is showing.

And the investigation is there not to prove or disprove anything, but to merely provide its supporters with an excuse, a rationalization, to hate a President and tell themselves they are not doing so because he is a Democrat, or a black man, but because he is somehow legally unqualified for the job. Anything at all will do, providing it holds together long enough for genuinely stupid people like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin and Donald (‘People Love My Hair’) Trump to jump on the bandwagon and lead the chorus in several versions of “We Hate Him, But Not Because He’s Black.”MORE...