Stumble of the Week

“Birtherism,” the cult – whose most famous members are Glenn Beck and The Donald – that insists Barack Obama was not born in America, despite how many iterations of his birth certificate he produces, and is therefore at best ineligible to be president and at worst some kind of Manchurian candidate whom dark forces have made the first communist* president of the United States, seems finally to be running out of steam. But fear not, it has been replaced by “transcripterism,” whose adherents have offered a $20,000 reward to anyone who can produce the president’s transcripts from Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law School. In an article in Beck’s “The Blaze,” Wayne Allyn Root (Columbia 1983) suggests the reason he never heard of his now-famous classmate was because he rarely went to class, got lousy grades and “attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.” Oh, well, perhaps birtherism isn’t dead yet. Root, of course, equates the demands for Obama’s transcripts to those for Mitt Romney’s tax returns. * Helder Camara (1909-1999), Catholic Archbishop of Brazil: “When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist” (sent by my daughter, Annie).

Human Justice. In northern Mali where the people now live under Sharia law, an alleged thief recently had his hand cut off and a couple accused of adultery was stoned to death. I’m not saying all fundamentalists are alike. I just don’t want them running my country.