Birthers and truthers

Jonah Goldberg writing at the Corner brings out a remarkable fact. The liberal media regard the “truthers”—people who believe that President George W. Bush orchestrated the 9/11 attack—as mere “skeptics,” while it regards the “birthers”—people who point out that the circumstances of Obama’s birth are muddy at best and outright false at worse—as nutcases. The first group believe that Bush and the U.S. government worked with Muslim terrorists to destroy the World Trade Center and the U.S. Capitol in a series of attacks that if more successful would have killed tens of thousands of people, and they are respectable, if somewhat marginal; the second group demands to see Obama’s birth certificate, and they are dangerous lunatics, outside the reach of decent society.

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Daniel S. writes:

The 9/11 “truthers” are tolerated, if not supported, by the left because they cast as the villain the conservative, white male (which George W. Bush personified to them). Hence a secret cabal of white Christian males in the White House and Pentagon maliciously devised the conspiracy to attack the World Trade Center and Pentagon and blame poor, brown peaceful Muslims so that the white, neo-crusader Christian imperialists could invade poor, oppressed Muslim nations and steal all their oil. Such a scheme appeals to the racial, economic, anti-American, and anti-Christian biases of the left. (Of course anti-Semitic paleo-conservatives like Paul Craig Roberts like the 9/11 conspiracy theories because him yet another chance to attack the Jews.) The birthers on the other hand cast Barack Hussein Obama, a left-wing black, in a negative light and hence the vicious reaction of the left. The fact that birther sentiments are mostly confined to conservatives whites is yet another source of ire for the left.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 18, 2010 05:05 PM | Send