Our own John Amato made an appearance on Al Jazeera to discuss the "carnival barkers" and birthers out there that President Obama attempted to placate by finally releasing the long form of his birth certificate.
The Al Jazeera anchor asked John if he thought it was a mistake for President Obama to produce his long form birth certificate. As John noted, when you've got 45% of registered Republican voters actually believing this nonsense that the President wasn't born in the United States and when you tie that into very powerful interests like Trump who is out there touting this stuff, the administration decided they'd finally had enough of it and decided to attempt to put an end to this story.
When asked if responding to these conspiracy theorists is just going to promote more of this stuff like asking about the President's degree from Harvard or college records, John pointed out that people like Pat Buchanan who was questioning his college records and using the term "affirmative action president" are doing nothing but using code words to dog whistle the racist elements of the Republican base.
As John noted, this obviously won't put an end to the right wing questioning the legitimacy of our President and what a sad case this is and what our political dialog has become when we've got real problems we should be worrying about instead of this nonsense.
The Al Jazeera host asked John why there isn't more outrage from Democrats and from the White House and why they don't just come out and call Trump what he is, a racist.
John pointed out that President Obama, as the first African American President has always been in a precarious position with this since he's tried to be the president of the United States, and not just the president of African Americans and the poor.
Sadly as John alluded to here, it really didn't matter how President Obama has governed. There is a large segment of our population that was never going to accept that a black man was elected president. The "carnival barkers" like Trump and Buchanan have just laid that fact bare with their idiotic and racist remarks.
