Happy Birthers Days to Us All...

I'm not going to characterize the birthers movement as racism per se. A few generations ago, their tactics could have been used to marginalize white Catholics. So while the issue isn't explicitly racial, it's decidedly a matter of xenophobia and old-fashioned prejudice.

I was proved quite wrong when I told friends last summer, "There's no chance in hell that the nation that elected George Bush twice [and yes, I do believe he was elected twice] will put a man named Barak Hussein Obama in the White House."

Indeed, McCain ran a close "race" with Obama till the meltdown convinced enough Americans that it was willing to elect as their leader a guy whose name rhymes with Osama.

Birthers say their concerns are simply procedural and constitutional, and yet oddballs such as Orly Taitz of Orange County misread our Constitution in concocting imaginary procedures. Still, I'm deeply disturbed by the image of the YouTube video Gail-Tz refers to, of the angry Delaware woman (and angrier mob) demanding her country back.

Neurologists tell us that our brain logic is driven inexorably and almost totally by emotions. Primal negative emotions, including xenophobic ones, are inextricably part of human evolution, and they lead to a quite deadly (but perfectly reasonable) logic. That's the reason America's emotional biases against words like "Hussein" worry me just as much as any specific racial bias.