Just once, before I slip past this mortal valle lacrimarum (vale of tears), I would like to read something positive, uplifting, and inspiring about my home state of Alabama.
Alas, lately, the trend continues suggesting I will move on eventually, and, sadly, ultimately be denied that experience.
Not bad enough that the fine people of Selma are trying to raise funds to up the ante on a memorial to the founder of the KKK in the past month, now I get to read that some of the legislators in Alabama are hopping on the insane anti-Obama Birther bandwagon, base on their viewing of the film Dreams From My Real Father.
“Birthers” are flipping their tinfoil hats over a new film that claims President Barack Obama’s father was not a Kenyan goat herder but rather a communist journalist nearly four decades older than his mother. The problem? It undermines a bedrock of birther lore: that the president is ineligible to be commander-in-chief.
“Dreams From My Real Father,” a 97-minute film narrated by an Obama impersonator, weaves the narrative that Obama’s grandfather wasn’t a furniture salesman but an undercover CIA agent who convinced Barack Obama Sr. to marry his teenage daughter to hide the fact that she was impregnated by a 55-year-old communist named Frank Marshall Davis.
The fake Obama narrator sets up the tale as the “the story I would have told if I were being honest with you.” Built through archival black and white footage, the film’s disclaimer states that it includes “re-creations of probable events, using reasoned logic, speculation, and approximated conversations in an attempt to provide a cohesive understanding of Obama’s history.”
Using that disclaimer, the filmmakers assert that Obama had a nose job ahead of his 2004 run for Senate, that his mother posed for naked photos when she was five weeks pregnant with him and that Bill Ayers nurtured Obama’s career.
Now we have the Chair of the Alabama GOP throwing his hat in the Birther ring based on this movie.
The head of the Alabama Republican Party this week threw his support behind one of the most far-fetched theories of the already bizarre birther movement.
Speaking to a group of GOP diehards on Wednesday in Fairhope, Ala., party Chair Bill Armistead raved about a film called “Dreams From My Real Father.” The movie claims President Obama’s grandfather was a CIA agent who convinced Barack Obama Sr. to marry his teenage daughter to hide the fact that she’d been secretly impregnated by a communist.
The Mobile Press-Register reported that Armistead’s comments came after he was asked by someone in the group about another film, “2016: Obama’s Presidency,” which also weaves elaborate theories about the president’s upbringing.
“If you haven’t seen it, you should,” Armistead said, according to the newspaper. “But I’m going to tell you about another movie. The name of it is ‘Dreams From My Real Father.’ That is absolutely frightening. I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it.”
Alabama GOP Chair Goes Birther, Says Obama’s Communist Upbringing ‘Verified’
Permit me, as a native son of Alabama, who fled the state in 1969 after finishing college, never to return except for short visits to relatives and friends trapped there and unable or unwilling to also flee, to point out that Alabama deserves every bit of the scorn and contempt it receives from the rest of the country for its sheer blind bigotry, ignorance, and racism.
When growing up, we always comforted ourselves with the knowledge that Mississippi, next door to the west, was always worse on every statistical measure. I have to ask myself if Alabama is not the state scraping the bottom of the barrel now.
The Alabama state constitution is used in law schools nation wide to teach students what a constitution is NOT. It is a multi-volume, ever growing compendium of laws that legislate down to the municipality level, trying to tweak and control stuff that should only ever be addressed legislatively at no level higher than a city council or a dog catcher’s office.
And this GOP Chair is an example of the kinds of politicians that fill the halls of the Alabama state legislature, and the kind of person that they elect to Congress.
They watch what is obviously a total wingnut whack job of disinformation and falsehood like this film, and believe it Why? Because it speaks directly to nothing but their blind stupidity. It fits their belief system. Facts, truth, history, logic: these all mean nothing to them. This is the party that has rejected science, that has rejected history, that when in power in Congress simply ignores the studies done by the bi-partisan offices that research the effect of legislation on the economy.
Apparently this bozo, like many on the right, missed the memo from the late 1980’s. Communism is dead. Over. Finished. The only place it is hanging on by a thread is in North Korea, and that regime will probably collapse within another decade or two. To call China a Communist nation anymore is almost laughable. It is a totalitarian capitalistic society. In fact, it is practicing capitalism so hard, investing in major infrastructure, while we in the USA are allowing ours to collapse, there is a good chance they will be kicking us hard in global economic competition within a couple of more decades, if we do not reverse our current refusal to reinvest in American infrastructure, jobs, and manufacturing.
Ignorant, bigoted, ill-informed, and wallowing in all of the above. That describes this GOP Chair. And he is a perfect exemplar of the modern GOP core supporter and voter.
