Washington, We Have a Problem | Politics | Vanity Fair

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/09/broken-washington-201009?printable=true&currentPage=all

The viral communities of the Internet make outright falsehoods nearly impossible to extinguish. Was Obama born in Kenya? Of course not, and his campaign put his “certification of live birth,” from Hawaii, confirmed as authentic by the state’s registrar of vital statistics, up on the Internet for all to see. And yet a recent New York Times/CBS News poll reveals that 20 percent of Americans believe Obama was born in another country, and that another quarter aren’t sure he was American-born. The mainstream media have published lengthy reports that, by any objective standard, should have thoroughly refuted the idea that Obama is a Muslim, or was educated in a madrassa, or favors the creation of “death panels” to ration end-of-life care. It doesn’t matter. A national Harris poll this spring found that 57 percent of Republicans believe that Obama is in fact a Muslim (and, for good measure, 38 percent believe he is “doing many of the things that Hitler did,” and 24 percent believe that Obama actually “may be the anti-Christ”).

(via Instapaper)

This is one of those stories that destroys any remaining elements of faith one might have in our ability to self-govern. This Hitler comparison is obviously absurd, unless people were being quite brilliantly literal and suggesting that, like Hitler, Obama regularly uses his digestive system to extract nutrients from food and multiple times per minute converts oxygen into carbon dioxide and only occasionally attempts to realize his commitment to a white supremacist view of the world.

Can China hurry up and take over, impose some order and tell us what to do? We clearly have too much ideological discretion in this country.