GOP Between Scylla and Charybdis

As the 2012 election seasons starts to warm up slowly, a few "issues" have emerged ahead of time which seem to fascinate the right wing.  Donald Trump's carnival barking about Pres. Obama's birth certificate has brought the birthers their much sought after day in the sun.

"At last!" they exclaimed, "someone is taking us seriously and now the rest of the country will too!"

The problem for them, however, was the Obama is a masterful campaigner, despite whatever one might believe about his ability as president.  The man plays a deep game.  So, what does he do?  He provides the very document the birthers (and Trump) claimed to have wanted.  The birthers thus have a choice:  accept the document and hold their heads high with intellectual honesty that their fears were abated or construct elaborate new conspiracies about the very document they requested.

Guess which route they chose.

Thus, the birthers expose themselves in their shining moment for the crazies they were from the beginning.  Donald Trump, their hero, was tacitly called a "carnival barker" by the most powerful man in the world, and all their claims about wanting a specific document as the proof positive were shown to be false since even that didn't satisfy them.

So, what is a potential GOP nominee to do?  He (or she) has two choices in this:

1.  Embrace the birther, even mildly, and keep their hope alive that they still have a potential voice in the national conversation.  This results in likely tepid interest in such a candidate from the independent and moderate voters out there.  The candidate now bears the taint of crazy.

 

2.  Reject the birther claims and then pray to whatever god he (or she) holds dear that the birthers don't rally their teabagger friends to leverage some weight at the GOP convention.

Maybe Romney's Mormonism, Huckabee's bad decisions, Gingrich's infidelity, and Pawlenty's utter lack of anything resembling a personality will be the least of their worries...

 

[caption id="attachment_1150" align="aligncenter" width="436" caption="Guess which side has the birthers?"][/caption]