Bill Maher is about as tired of the painting of President Obama as "the other" as I am. Here's his "New Rules" segment from the Sept. 17th show.
MAHER: And finally if you know less about Barack Obama than any other president on history, you just might be a redneck. Now, I mentioned this because last week Haley Barbour who is the former head of the Republican Party, the current Governor of Mississippi and of course Boss Hoggs of the Dukes of Hazard, said about Obama
“this is a president we know less about than any other president in history.”Really? We know less about Obama than say Millard Fillmore? Oh yeah, Fillmore, we had too much information about that guy. I don’t need that picture in my head of Fillmore having telegraphed with sex with Harriet Tubman.
You know this effort by the right to insist that Obama is un-knowable has culminated now in the bizarre belief that the President is secretly a Muslim.
An astounding one in five Americans believe this. And two in five believe he’s a hologram projected by a Chinese satellite. One in seven thinks he’s under their bed right now..
You know it was bad enough when the birthers said he was born in Africa. Now we have the churchers who doubt his religion even though during the campaign they were screaming about Obama being too beholden to his whacko Christian minister.
But now they say he was just faking being Christian for two decades so he could secretly get elected as a Muslim.
Wow, that is one undercover brother. Let me show you some pictures of Barack Obama. He smokes, he drinks beer, he eats hotdogs... and he checks out ass. Let me tell you, if he's a Muslim he stinks at it.
Obama loves war and rich people and he never goes to church. If that doesn't prove he's a Christian I don't know what does. Wait, it gets worse. Ten percent of Americans don't think Obama is a Muslim or a Christian. They think he's "something else".
Right. He's tall. He's not white. Maybe he's an avatar. How could it happen that one of the most thoroughly researched and vetted men in our history is suddenly transformed into a giant question mark?
I'll tell you how. Because teabaggers love the truth. They just hate facts. And giving them facts not only fails to change their mind, it actually makes them embrace the bullshit more.
This is why after you spend ninety minutes patiently explaining to your brother in law that taxes had actually gone down under Obama, he calls you a fag and goes into the garage to listen to his police scanner.
In conclusion let me point out that in 2008 these same people who believed that we don't know enough about Barack Obama were completely okay pulling the lever for someone who no one had even ever heard of, the real housewife of Wasilla.