On Saturday Oct 6, a brief diary was posted about Paul Ryan mailing out copies of the President's birth certificate, ostensibly to settle questions asked by skeptical Republicans about the President's place of birth.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
As could be expected, reactions among Kossacks to this diary were mixed, with some people commending Ryan for showing some integrity, others being "meh" and a third group showing high skepticism of Ryan's motives for doing so. At the time I was in the 3rd camp of skeptical folks, and I even voiced my speculations in this comment:
No he did it because of the DVD (2+ / 0-)
that the GOP has mailed to white swing state voters alleging that PBO was born in America to a different father (Frank Marshall) than the Kenyan Barack Obama Sr.
That doesn't jibe with the birther argument, so Ryan has to first set them straight on that issue.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Now to be fair to Ryan, we've been told that his office has apparently been mailing these certificates since 2008, well before he was part of Mitt Romney's presidential ticket. And I wasn't aware of that when I posted my comment. The diarist also correctly pointed out that we needed to take his actions at face value - regardless of his motives.
In the last few weeks however, the Republicans, with the help of Citizens United and other groups have launched "silent" attacks, targeting voters in battleground states who may have problems with Romney's policies, but who are vulnerable to being persuaded to vote against their own interests out of fear of Obama being re-elected. If the GOP can just associated President Obama with old racial stereotypes of criminality, ambiguous/false paternity, etc, Romney might just have a shot, particularly among White voters who harbor subconscious racial fears along those lines. Some of those attacks included, as I posted in my comment the mailing of a DVD "documentary" titled "Dreams of My REAL Father" to over a million voters in swing states.
So earlier today, Paul Ryan held a rally in Waukesha County, WI. As many of us here know, this is a Republican stronghold. And here's what went on outside (and probably inside) of that Ryan rally. This first-hand account was provide by David Weigel, a political contributor on MSNBC and the Slate:
The theory that Barack Obama was sired by communist poet Frank Marshall Davis? That's another story. Outside of Paul Ryan's rally today, I met James Zeiler, an independent activist with three boxes stacked with material. Two boxes contained anti-Obama and anti-George Soros pamphlets by George Soros. The other contained Dreams From My Real Father, the documentary that lays out the Obama-Davis theories.
http://www.slate.com/...
You can see the DVD's in this photograph.
http://farm9.staticflickr.com/...
Now, Weigel described this guy Zeiler as an "independent activist" but this guy is anything BUT independent. He's a hard-core RW, Teabagger, and is associated with Americans for Prosperity (WI chapter), which has put out numerous anti-Obama ads this election season. Zeiler was also a former staffer on the Herman Cain campaign. I highly doubt that Ryan (or the Romney campaign) was unaware of this guy's presence at that rally or his peddling of this DVD pushing a different form of "birtherism."
Hey Paul, we see what you did there. You're meeting behind closed doors with Birther-in-Chief Donald Trump while supposedly mailing out birth certificates. And you are holding rallies where new birtherism paraphernalia is being sold. Well, now it's your responsibility to publicly rebuke this new form of birtherism - otherwise we view your mailing of birth certificates as more empty and worthless posturing, just like your dish-washing of already clean dishes at that soup kitchen.