If you plan on acting in ignorance and prejudice, you shouldn’t be surprised when what you beget boomerangs back your way.
I’m not sure what kind of response Joe Montgomery thought he’d get when he petitioned the all-Republican Kansas Objections Board to remove President Obama from the state ballot on the grounds the he was ineligible to run for the presidency due to his belief that he wasn’t born in the United States, but stupid is as stupid does. The 51-year-old Manhattan, KS resident decided to pull his objection last week because he can’t stomach the criticism.
In an email penned to Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Montgomery writes, “There has been a great deal of animosity and intimidation directed not only at me, but at people around me. I don’t wish to burden anyone with more of this negative reaction.”
No, you thought you could get away with being racist in peace.
Speaking with the Huffington Post, Montgomery added, “I didn’t file this objection with the desire to involve anyone else. This is me expressing myself on a personal political level. I would appreciate it if people would not call anyone associated with me, whether a personal or professional association.”
He also claimed that he filed the objection to spark dialogue. “I have not been successful in that objective,” he said. “Not in achieving a constructive dialogue.”
A simpleton wanted a conversation of substance based on a conspiracy theory.
Hardy har.
As a result of his request, Kay Curtis, a spokesperson for Kobach, said the board would meet on Monday and their motion would be to accept Montgomery’s latest plea.
Curtis told the Topeka Capital-Journal, “This is kind of unprecedented.”
It’s also very much a great waste of brain cells.
Still, before Montgomery decided to withdraw his ballot challenge, three of Kansas’ top elected Republicans determined last Thursday that they lacked “sufficient evidence of President Barack Obama’s birth records to decide whether to remove the Democratic nominee from the November ballot in Kansas.”
In other words, they’re the cashew, almond, and pistachio to Montgomery’s peanut.
This kind of indulgence of birthers from Republican leaders is exactly why Chris Matthews lampooned Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus and Mitt Romney for “joking” about the President Obama’s birth certificate.
However, it was Tom Brokaw’s defense of Mitt Romney’s “awkward sense of humor” and assertion that “both sides” engage in this sort of behavior that proves it’s not just the GOP who is to blame for this.
Bill Maher recently wrote in a blog entry that when he first saw the meme questioning then Sen. Obama’s citizenship he dismissed it as “obviously racist” and “dismissed it as a fringe rumor that would end with White supremacists.”
That prediction obviously didn’t pan out and in citing why he noted, “It wasn’t just the silence of Republican leaders, it was the failure of people like Tom Brokaw to just dismiss it as racism from the beginning. People like him are always championing ‘balance’ over objectivity.”
It is very much the failure of widely known journalists like Brokaw for not dismissing this belief that President Obama is some secret Kenyan hell bent on destroying America for the mind-numbingly dumb theory that it is. Their failure to do so is exactly why someone like Joe Montgomery believes his objection constitutes as “constructive dialogue.”
Even though he didn’t have to, President Obama has shown proof of his birth certificate, yet the likes of Joe Montgomery gets to make national headlines for taking his lingering racial biases to disturbingly new lows – without condemnation. The same goes for the attention whoring Donald Trump and that Mormon with a whole lot of nerve for trying to categorize someone else as “foreign.”
I keep asking, “Just how much longer are we going to entertain these yokels and their tired racist folklore?”
I already know the answer, though. I just wish certain journalists would start doing their jobs and help bring an end to this nonsense already.
Michael Arceneaux is a Houston-bred, Howard-educated writer and blogger. You can read more of his work on his site, The Cynical Ones. Follow him on Twitter: @youngsinick
