The Truth About Trump, Obama and the Race Card

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{snip} The public display of the document should have ended all doubts: Barack Obama is indeed a natural born citizen of the United States and eligible to be our president.

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[Donald] Trump is now questioning whether the president was smart enough to write a best-selling book. He is asking if Obama is too busy playing basketball to handle the economy. Trump is doubting whether Obama had the grades to get Harvard Law School and suggesting he is just an affirmative action token.

It is hard not to see a pattern in these questions. The president is not smart enough to write his own book, he is not smart enough to get into Harvard, and he spends his time playing basketball. The pattern sure looks racial, smells racial, and invites Whoopi to call a spade a spade.

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Some will undoubtedly believe the long-form birth certificate is another forgery and part of the elaborate conspiracy to conceal the “truth” about the president’s past. Recent polls showed a quarter of all Americans doubting the President was born in the USA. Nearly half of Republicans shared that view and practically everyone in the Tea Party.

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The truth is that this national disgrace was never really about birth certificates or citizenship. It is about the fact that no matter what his policies–and there is a lot to argue with in his policies and leadership style–some people appear to never have accepted a president who is very smart, patriotic, hard-working and a family guy. They cannot accept that he is different from the majority of the American people in terms of his name, his life experience and yes, his race.

In the “birther” mindset, different equals dangerous. They can’t say this out loud because they will then be called out for naked racism. So they have stoked doubt about the president’s birth certificate, speaking in coded language and tacitly indulging the race-baiting.

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And others top Republicans and talk show hosts have winked and kept a sly smile, while asking why is it such a big deal for the president to produce the long-form of his birth certificate.

That disgraceful coded language led many Americans down the path of disparaging, even disliking the president on the basis of innuendo.

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Marc Morial, the president of the Urban League and the former mayor of New Orleans mayor, blasted Trump in an interview with Politico, “There’s a lot of people that I’ve talked to [who] instinctively think that he’s using the issue as a proxy for race. . . . I don’t know if it has resonance in the Republican Party but I certainly think it has resonance in certain far right elements of the American public.”

“It’s like a modern day Salem witch trial–because there’s no merit to it,” Morial contended.

And South Carolina Democrat Rep. James Clyburn, the highest ranking African-American in Congress, likened the birther controversy to Jackie Robinson’s experience in Major League Baseball. He told USA Today Thursday, that Obama “has not put the issue to bed . . . all he did was lay out the truth for everyone to see.”

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It is up to them [the “birthers”] whether they chose to accept the authenticity of the long-form birth certificate and move on from this dark period in our recent political history. Maybe we should ask for their birth certificates and question their patriotism if they fail to abandon this myth once and for all.