How Ingraham ducks the “whackjob” label

Under the headline “Another big talker says: release birth certificate” comes the report from WorldNetDaily that “one of talk radio’s first ladies, Laura ingraham, believes Barack Obama was born in the United States and is a legitimate president, but she suggests it wouldn’t hurt him to release his original long form birth certificate.”  Like Newt Gingrich, Ingraham professes a belief while admitting that the evidence needed to justify it is being withheld.   This smacks of a certain lack of intellectual integrity.  So why the awkward profession of belief?  Well, a lot of “conservative” commentators and public figures have stood silently by while people making the same sensible demand they now articulate have been slandered and ridiculed.  This has produced the situation illustrated later in the article itself, when it reports a question put to David Axelrod by an ABC reporter: “Isn’t that like the whackjobs that tell the president he needs to show them his long form birth certificate so he can put to rest the questions that have been raised?”

Obviously, “conservative” pundits and other public figures who now make the same point run the risk of being subjected to the treatment they have cravenly tolerated for others. They risk being tarred as “whackjobs” and run out of town on a rail of ridicule.  So, like the potential victims of inquisition in an era of religious persecution, they feel compelled to declare their faithful adherence to the elitist party line even as they acknowledge willful suppression of the factual evidence needed to sustain it.  Their obsequious declaration must seem like a shrewd maneuver except to those Americans imprudent enough to remember that courage is an indispensable virtue in those who would be free.

Of course, the prerequisites of freedom may not matter very much to people who have sold themselves into bondage for the sake of money and notoriety.  The latter may be the only kind of “freedom” they now understand.  Laura Ingraham calls on Obama to cease the suppression of evidence regarding his eligibility because “it wouldn’t hurt him”.  With this formulation she and others are now apparently willing to beg, as it were, this favor of his grace.  But they continue to ignore what ought to be the more important consideration, which is the harm his contempt for its provisions does to the authority of the Constitution and to the American people whose sovereignty it is supposed to implement.  This ignorance reflects what now appears to be the prevailing ethos of America’s wannabe “ruling class”, according to which the only things that matter are those helpful or hurtful to themselves.

This is confirmed by the context of their sudden willingness to call attention to Obama’s stubborn efforts to keep secret the constitutionally relevant details of his background.  Obama and his factional cohorts are trying to diminish the electoral momentum that at the moment appears likely to overturn their faction’s control of the U.S. Congress.  As part of this effort they are seeking to foment public distrust of their opponents using, among other things, the accusation that they are funded and manipulated by self-serving special interests, including foreign sources with motives adverse to the security of the American people.

Ingraham and others are certainly right to point out the breathtaking chutzpah of this maneuver.  After her remarks “a spokesman for Ingraham’s show said the commentary was describing the hypocrisy of the Obama administration.”  “[White House Press Secretary] Robert Gibbs insisted that certain organization should release the name of their donors in the ‘spirit of disclosure’ ” he continued.  “We made the point on the show that there are a lot of things the White House could release voluntarily in order to put to rest some of the gaps in the public’s knowledge including Obama’s college records and papers and the complete White House visitors list.  The non-release of the president’s long form birth certificate is an is another example of the White House not engaging in the spirit of disclosure they desire to force on their political enemies.”

This is a valid point.  However, the blatantly partisan timing of the willingness to raise it points to the self-serving nature of the action.  When it was just a matter of harm to the authority of the U.S. Constitution and the sovereignty of the American people these “conservatives” apparently were content to let others be persecuted as madmen because they opposed the destructive arrogance of the Obama faction.  How quickly they find their courage, however, when that faction’s arrogant assault comes against the faction to which they evidently feel their main allegiance.  In this respect their timing seems to verify the charge Obama’s minions bring against their motives.

I see little to choose between those willing to destroy America’s common good as they pursue their factional ambition, and those unwilling to defend it until by doing so they serve some factional purpose of their own.  To be sure for now we have no choice but to use the latter to parry the deathblow which the former aim against our decent freedom.  But anyone willing to believe that the liberty of this nation is safe in the hands of either, must be anxious to deserve the “whackjob” label these factions either apply to, or tolerate against, anyone who does not swear allegiance to their elitist, selfish aims.

I remember once reading an account of the American Revolution that suggested that the taxes the King of Great Britain sought to impose on the American people at the time were not in any economic sense onerous or unreasonable.  As I recall, this was intended as criticism.  Instead I stored it up as evidence that the leaders in that founding revolution put greater value on matters of public justice and moral principle than on the merely selfish concerns of livelihood and personal success.  People who really wish to restore and strengthen America’s life in freedom need now more than ever to remember the example of such leaders, for they were willing to stand with courage when nothing was at stake except the truths that make us free.  Their virtue set America on a path to great achievement.  Now with none to choose from but leaders who lack such virtue, America hurtles over the precipice of great ruin.  Is this mere coincidence?