Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com draws some distinctions between the “birthers” and the “truthers”. The “truthers”, if like me you’ve never heard of them before, are people who believe that George Bush, Dick Cheney and/or the CIA knew about 9-11 before it happened. Apparently a 2007 Rasmussen poll found that 61% of Democrats “either believed that George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, or weren’t certain that he didn’t.” This suggests, on its surface, that we Democrats can be as crazy as the birthers.
Unfortunately, unlike Nate (probably) I don’t have access to the poll to which he links (it costs money to actually see it), so I can’t retrieve the precise question asked, but in all probability there are good and sound reasons for that high number that don’t involve tin foil hats.
Recall that, among other things, people who read the news or don’t watch Fox knew at least one thing, that Bush had ignored a CIA briefing a month prior to 9/11 in which he was, according to Condoleeza Rice, told that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike in the U.S.
Now, had I been asked in 2007 if Bush had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks I would have had to parse the question carefully in order to give a precise answer. If the question is whether Bush had precise and specific knowledge of the date and the time, then the answer (even I believe) is clearly “no”. But if the question is taken more broadly, then maybe the answer is yes. He did have advance knowledge of bin Laden’s intent to attack, which he proceeded to ignore. Unless the question was precise, it would not have been unreasonable for a person to respond in the affirmative to a question merely asking if Bush had advance knowledge of the attacks. He was warned about just such an event, and told that bin Laden intended to make such an attack. In a much broader and general way, many informed people had advance knowledge of the attack, in the sense that we had been warned by experts that such an attack was a real possibility. I have been polled on occasion, and have sometimes pushed back against the underpaid person on the other side of the line because I felt the question was vague or ambiguous. Unless this question was very precisely phrased, it is quite likely that the question many people heard was whether Bush knew that Obama intended to attack, in which case an affirmative answer was in line with historical truth.
The question posed to out the birthers does not seem to be terribly ambiguous:
Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States of America or not?
Although one would wish that the “or not” had been left off the end, since one could argue that the only logical answer to the question is “yes”. After all, the question can be rephrased, according to the rules of grammar as follows: Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States or do you believe that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. (The allowed answers were “yes”, “no” and “not sure”.) Still, I think this question is clear from the common sense perspective, so the no responses probably really represent folks who have chosen to believe a fiction for which there is no evidence.
Speaking of the lack of evidence, it has always mystified me that there has been an assumption that Obama would not have been a “natural born citizen” had he been born outside the States. I had always understood that a person born to an American mother outside the country is born a citizen. Apparently, it’s a little more complicated than that, since American law, for a reason that is unintelligible to me, punishes the child of a young American mother:
A child born abroad to one U.S. citizen parent and one alien parent acquires U.S. citizenship at birth under Section 301(g) INA provided the citizen parent was physically present in the U.S. for the time period required by the law applicable at the time of the child’s birth. (For birth on or after November 14, 1986, a period of five years physical presence, two after the age of fourteen is required. For birth between December 24, 1952 and November 13, 1986, a period of ten years, five after the age of fourteen are required for physical presence in the U.S. to transmit U.S. citizenship to the child.
Obama was born when his mother was 19, so she could have put in the required five years in the States, and in fact she apparently did, as she never lived in Africa, but of course, that’s precisely the point at which the birthers part company with reality.
I took a bicycle ride today of approximately 35 miles. It began and ended at our rented house. The first 20 miles or so trend downhill, as is illustrated by this view of the river that runs along route 131.
But, as any seasoned cyclist knows, a round trip means you pay for every downhill. In this case the uphill is on the road from Felchville to Tyson. Felchville appears to be a mythical place. There is a sign in Tyson telling you that it is 10 miles away, but when you get there it is Reading, where there is another sign telling you that, should you reverse direction, you’re 10 miles from Tyson. 
