Karl Rove’s Incredible Comparison

Politico reported that Karl Rove former advisor to George W. Bush spoke Wednesday Feb 16, 2011 on Fox News and said that the rumors created by the Birthers are discrediting the GOP.

Rove said that, “Within our party, we’ve got to be very careful about allowing these people who are the birthers and the 9/11-deniers to get too high a profile and say too much without setting the record straight. We need the leaders of our party to say, Look, stop falling into the trap of the White House and focus on the real issues. Spending time and energy on — and getting media attention for — comments about where the president was born are a distraction that discredits the lawmakers and candidates making the remarks.”

Mr. Rove is obviously ignoring polls taken earlier in the week that found that of 400 Republican primary voters a whopping 51 percent do not think Obama was born in the United States. Didn’t the Republicans dominate the November elections on the idea of being “The People’s Party?” Has that idea already lost its luster? Need we remind Mr. Rove that the 51 percent that pulled the lever for the GOP did so because they want to be heard and they don’t want their representatives to go silent on them?

Rove, who is usually the voice of reason and offers brilliant assessments of political complexities, went even a step further by lumping the Birthers and the 9/11 truthers into one single category. We may not be able to classify Mr. Rove’s remarks as a gaffe but they most assuredly would come under the heading of a very poorly worded solecism.

Birthers are asking a question of vetting and Constitutional law; Truthers are those who are not willing to accept what was seen by the naked eye and want to drag the U.S. government into a conspiracy to bring down the Twin Towers. One group is asking a reasonable question of the law; the other may as well be asking who the second shooter was on the grassy knoll at Dealey Plaza in Dallas. To compare the two or speak of them in the same sentence is completely unbalanced and may actually be insulting.

Lumping Birthers and Truthers into one category is wrong but so is lumping all the Birthers into a single category. In fact Birthers come in three convenient sizes but all of them deserve to be heard by their representatives and not silenced, labeled or dismissed as a fussing gaggle of disgruntled children.

One group of Birthers want only one thing and that quite clearly is to see President Obama’s long form birth certificate. For them, this alone would be proof beyond all doubt that he was born in the United States. Among those in this group are those who strongly believe he was born here but they would like to see the matter finally put to bed.

The second contingent of Birthers are those who don’t care if Obama was born in the United States because a look at his personal history and parentage indicates strongly that he has dual citizenship and that also would make him ineligible to hold the Office of President of the United States. This group will not be placated by merely seeing the birth certificate; they want the interpretation of the Constitution to answer the question of eligibility and nothing less.

The third group is not so much questioning whether Mr. Obama was born in the United States but only whether he was properly vetted to hold the high office of President. This is the group that says posting a COLB online is not an acceptable way to vet a President. In fact they contend that rather than being poorly vetted Mr. Obama was not vetted at all by election commissioners, attorneys general or any recognized form of the law.

These people are most likely to tell you that they feel cheated because they have to produce proper identification for almost everything throughout their entire lifetimes, but one once-obscure Senator can waltz into the White House on fiery speech followed by a posting of his COLB made on the much distrusted Internet, and now they are not supposed to ask the big question: who is this guy?

Karl Rove contends that paying attention to the birther issue distracts from the real issues and that while Mr. Obama’s Presidency is an example of poor government he is nevertheless a great politician.

With the White House controlled DNC found today to be organizing union forces in Wisconsin, it would be hard to argue with Rove about the President’s politics, but this along with the last two years of policies that have left the country reeling and broke, doesn’t it look more like damage control than taking on the issues? Isn’t the vetting of a president a real issue or perhaps we should ask: when did it cease to be an issue? In fact it is more than an issue; it’s the law.

The world will not stop turning because of Mr. Rove’s remarks but on the other side of the coin neither will the birthers rest until this question is answered.

In the mean time let me make at least one small observation about lumping Birthers and Truthers together.

Almost every single human being alive in this country today saw two fully fueled commercial aircraft slam into the Twin Towers on that fateful day on September 11, 2001. By contrast, not one human being alive in this country today has seen the real hospital issued long form birth certificate of Mr. Barack Obama.

Let the people speak Mr. Rove, America will be the better for it!