Chi Trib: Virulent Barack Obama opponents won't go away

[Mark E. Smith]

Tribune staff report
December 7, 2008

Silly me. Here I had been thinking that the wild-eyed foamers who were driven
nearly to madness by the prospect of Barack Obama's election to the presidency
were going to wait until Obama actually did something to offend them before
going nuts again.

But no.

Those who spent most of the 1990s seething that Bill and Hillary Clinton were
serial murderers and who devoted the entire 2008 campaign cycle to painting
Obama as a mysterious radical aren't relaxing during the transition.

Much of their energy these days is devoted to the effort to block Obama from
assuming the presidency on the grounds that he's not a "natural born citizen"
of the United States as the Constitution requires.

Their hopes rest on several false and farfetched propositions. And they rely, in
the end, on either the Supreme Court or Congress being willing to create political
chaos during an already very frightening and perilous times based on various
idiosyncratic interpretations of constitutional language and other statutes.

The Tribune has explained the error of their ways in several stories, and after I
added an approving "me too" at Change of Subject last week, I was flooded with
furious and patronizing e-mail from all over the country.

Many of these zealots claim to be mere defenders of the Consitution. But poke
them, as I did in some instances, and out rushes the gassy blast of Bill -Ayers-
Reverend-Wright-Tony-Rezko-Rashid-khalidi-Occidental-College-Records
and other pints of concern that did not, to their dismay, turn the electorate
against Obama.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-change-obama-bd07dec07,0,5348796.story

You owe it to yourself to get in on the comments for this one. Loons a-plenty,
and foaming like a toilet full of fizzies.

[tavalon]

1. The comments have been disabled

I'm guessing the loons went over their loony allotment. LOL

You guys lost and well, get over it! What goes around, comes around.

[Peregrine Took]

2. The editors at the Trib's comment section are terrible! The loonies come

from all across the country (why I don't know) to post their filth and hate there.

I used to post against them but its like sticking your finger in the dam.

Who ARE these hate filled lunatics? They are so monstrous they even celebrate and mock cases of animal cruelty.

[grasswire]

3. why should there be editors on a comments section?

Let them speak. Let everyone speak. It's better for America to see what hatred they are saying than to hide it on talk radio or the back pages of lucianne.com.

[Robbien]

4. Because the wingnuts have an automatic spam bot which fills comment sections

with vile and hatred. Most of the vile posts on news sites are just generated spam from wingnuts.

[ovidsen]

5. This is beyond ridiculous

So President-elect Obama was born in Hawaii, before it became a state and was "just" a territory.

John McCain was born in what was the US controlled Panama Canal Zone, which was later ceded back to Panama. Does that make McCain any less of an American, born on American soil, who had every right to run for President? Of course not.

It's pathetic that these Obama haters are making a Constitutional issue of his being born in a US territory which later became a state, and yet I personally know of no Obama supporters who made an issue of the fact that McCain's birth took place in what is now another country, so that made him ineligible for the White House.

There are things like class and integrity. These Obama bashers just can't seem to grasp these concepts.

[Harry Monroe]

7. Actually Obama was born in 1961. Hawaii had been a state for 2 years by then

I agree, the whole thing is utterly ridiculous.

[ovidsen]

8. I stand corrected

And thanks. The fact that Hawaii was a state when Obama was born there makes the claims by Obama phobics even more deplorable.

I confess my guilt for swallowing their BS. I thought their whole argument was based on the "fact" that Hawaii was a US possession, and not a state when he was born there. A simple Wikipedia check would have cleared that up, but I didn't do it. Which kind of makes me an idiot.

But not as idiotic as the zealots who would actually go to court to argue a point that any judge who isn't brain dead would throw out in the blink of an eye on basic Constitutional grounds.

[Mark E. Smith]

6. You know, the Supreme Court did such a fine job ..

.. the last time they got to select a president, why
wouldn't they want to try their hand at it again?