Ugly politics: What we are learning from Obama's birth certificate and Trump's possible racism

Two quick ones this morning...




'Face the Nation' Host: Trump's a Racist! (4/27/2011 8:30 PM PDT by TMZ Staff)

Having been shot down on the birther issue, Trump continues to take the political high road with new allegations about Obama. 

From the article:

Bob Schieffer appeared Wednesday night on "The CBS Evening News" and reacted to Trump's latest salvo against President Barack Obama, in which Trump suggested the Prez might not have had the grades to get into Harvard Law School.

Schieffer said, "That's just code for saying he got into law school because he's black. This is an ugly strain of racism that's running through this whole thing."

Moving on...

This next article is very interesting, claiming that the level of the president's response to the latest round of birther allegations marks something of a benchmark in the evolving, modern political climate where facts count a lot less than volume.  While, in the past, many generations ago, politics were much uglier than they are now and I'd stay away from saying that we are approaching an all time low, we are still hitting a bottom that we haven't reached in many generations.

A new era of accusation and innuendo (Jonathan Martin, John F. Harris – Thu Apr 28, 5:47 am ET)

From the article:

Lurid conspiracy theories have followed presidents for as long as the office has existed. Yet even Obama’s most recent predecessors benefited from a widespread consensus that some types of personal allegations had no place in public debate unless or until they received some imprimatur of legitimacy — from an official investigation, for instance, or from a detailed report by a major news organization.

...

It’s hard to imagine Bill Clinton coming out to the White House briefing room to present evidence showing why people who thought he helped plot the murder of aide Vincent Foster— never mind official rulings of suicide — were wrong. George W. Bush, likewise, was never tempted to take to the Rose Garden to deny allegations from voices on the liberal fringe who believed that he knew about the Sept. 11 attacks ahead of time and chose to let them happen.

Obama did something like the equivalent of this, by releasing complete documentation from his Hawaii birth, then making a sober West Wing appearance to explain himself.