Quote Originally Posted by Evil_Maniac From Mars View Post
I don't think it's because he's black. I think that a lot of people jump on the bandwagon for that reason, but I don't think that's why it started.
I don't think you really understand American politics. Now, there are a multitude of reasons why one might oppose President 44, and most of them are legit. There are ideological reasons, practical reasons, legal reasons, constitutional reasons, etc., and I'm not disputing any of them.

But when people start inventing stuff out of whole cloth, and a (almost entirely) white group of (mostly) Southern people buy into it, I'm put in mind of Lee Atwater's quote:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “*****, *****, *****.” By 1968 you can't say “*****”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.”

And even that is watered down compared to the birther insanity.

When Beck panders to the birthers, he is explicitly endorsing a racist perspective. When he "asks questions" about the president's legitimacy, he is throwing gasoline on a long-smoldering fire.

As for "inane," as a non-native speaker you are probably unaware of its finer implications, that the subject is "silly and pointless." There's nothing silly about a movement that motivates a small but vocal part of the electorate to declare that a democratic election should be overturned because the black man doesn't have his papers. It's nasty and hateful, actually, qualities that you would never describe as inane. Seinfeld was inane, because it's a show about nothing. Inanity implies a certain fluffy meaninglessness, not malignant delusion.

If we want to take this much further we should probably spin it off into its own thread ...