Thursday, April 15, 2010

Today’s Tea Party protest at the State Capitol was a pretty mild affair compared to previous ones I’ve seen – there were very few signs advocating, for example, violent revolution against the federal government, or suggesting that Barack Obama was not born in the United States (a view held by a disproportionately large percentage of Tea Partiers), or comparing high-ranking Democrats to Adolf Hitler. Accusing the President and Congress of Marxism, socialism and communism are all still acceptable, of course, but it's good to see the Tea Partiers accept that Nazism might be a stretch.

On the contrary, there were dozens of people walking around with voter-registration and initiative signature petitions, and most of the speakers were exhorting their listeners to get out there and vote, as opposed to, say, urging them to "take up arms" in their battle against everything Obama. I don’t know how many of the TPers trying to overturn California’s landmark climate emissions law knew that they were shilling for powerful Texas oil companies in the process, but kudos to them for at least getting involved. It’s more than you can say for most Americans.

Indeed, there seem to be signs that the Tea Party is becoming less and less insane by the day. Earlier this week, organizers of today’s protest in Pleasanton disinvited Orly Taitz from speaking at their event.

Taitz, for those of you who don’t know, is the nutcase who heads up the Birther movement alleging that Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen, shouts instead of talking, and is running for California secretary of state. Hey, Orly – when the folks who dress up like Ben Franklin, have no idea that Medicare is a government-run program, and carry around signs portraying Nancy Pelosi as Pinocchio are calling you a weirdo… wow.

Adding insult (read “sanity”) to injury (read “craziness”), two high-profile Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate – Carly Fiorina and Chuck DeVore – have disavowed Taitz’s theories completely, each one boldly asserting Barack Obama’s legitimacy to be president.

Fiorina, via a spokesperson, had the cojones to own up to her belief that “President Obama is absolutely eligible for the presidency and is a natural-born United States citizen.”

And DeVore, the self-proclaimed “Tea Party candidate” in this race, “strongly disapproves of Orly Taitz and the crazy theories she continues to advance.”

This is strong stuff, considering that the Obama-was-born-here view only holds sway with about four in ten Republicans, and a similar number of Tea Partiers.

Maybe the biggest news in this story is that this is actually considered news in today’s America – that a group of conservatives, including two candidates for office, have accepted that the President of the United States was actually born here and that this isn’t all just some clever Kenyan/Russian/Chinese/Iranian/Venezuelan hoax.

Not that this has caught on with all GOP politicos – in the same article linked to above, neither the vice chair of the California Republican Party nor a prominent State Assembly candidate from the East Bay (and current mayor of San Ramon) would say where they believe Obama was born.

Here’s my question, though – do they really believe that crap about us landing on the moon?

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