Stromata Blog

How to Reelect Barack Obama

The American Thinker, a relatively new Web site that was developing a reputation for useful conservative commentary, has disgraced itself by publishing, at the top of yesterday’s front page, “President Obama Needs to Prove His Constitutional Eligibility to Be Commander-in-Chief”. There’s no irony in the title. The screed, written by an Army doctor who has declared his intention to “refuse to obey any orders from my commanding officers – including President Obama – until the president produces his original birth certificate”, is a collection of birther clichés. The comments overwhelmingly praise the writer’s would-be mutiny.

At a time when public opinion is turning sharply against the Obama Administration, the Reid-Pelosi dumbvirate and the deadly dreams of progressive ideology, the Left’s last hope is that it can brand its opponents as mentally unstable extremists. That’s why the President claims that birthers are the “core group” of the Tea Party movement. It’s also why he isn’t going to produce further proof of his American citizenship (beyond the evidence that was regarded as sufficient by every judge who heard the birthers’ lawsuits). He doesn’t want this pseudo-controversy to go away, because it is entirely to his benefit. A fierce national debate over the intricacies of Hawaiian birth records distracts attention from the Administration’s irresponsible fiscal trajectory, failing foreign policies, obtuse reactions to terrorist threats and efforts to expand government power.

Worse, if voters get the impression that the alternative to the Obami is a weird coterie of conspiracy mongers, they may well decide that, as the historian Oscar Handlin said about the 1972 election, better a knave than a fool.

The birthers’ conspiracy theory is far less malign than the 9/11 “truther” fantasies popular in many left-wing circles. There’s no moral comparison between “George W. Bush plotted the murder of 3,000 Americans” and “Barack Obama’s parents lied about where he was born”. Intellectually, though, both notions are preposterous. Conservatives who give aid and comfort to birtherism, as The American Thinker has, are acting as de facto agents of Rahm Emanuel.

The Oddest Hugo Ballot

Regular blogging won’t resume until I’ve completed a couple of time-eating projects (where do people get the idea that there’s more leisure after retirement?), but I can’t help noticing, first, that Aussiecon 4 has released the Hugo Award short list with admirable celerity (three weeks after nominations closed) and, second, that the results are odd in a number of ways. Not that I have anything against oddness.

To start with a good oddity, the number of ballots cast was up for the second straight year, to 864 from last year’s 799 and 2008’s subpar 483. Typical in recent years has been a bit over 600. Given that Aussiecon’s membership will inevitably be much smaller than the average Worldcon’s, that showing is a real credit to the concomm’s efforts to encourage eligible nominators (members of this year’s and last year’s Worldcons) to take part in the process.

Now we enter the Ripley zone:

• Five categories (Novel, Novella, Novelette, Related Book, Fanzine) have six nominees. Unless “equal” means something different in Strine, there were five ties for fifth place. That has never come near to happening before and seems particularly implausible when one considers the historically large number of votes cast.

• For the first time ever, the Big Three print magazines (Analog, Asimov’s, F&SF) were all but shut out of the short fiction categories. In 2009, they took nine of the 15 Novella, Novelette and Short Story slots. In 2010, they have three of 17. That original anthologies, which have been flourishing lately, and the Web would eventually break up the oligopoly was widely expected. Did anybody foresee that the transition would be so abrupt?

• One nominee for Best Related Book, Michael Swanwick’s biography of fantasy writer Hope Mirrlees, was published in a minuscule edition by an unknown house. So far as I can tell, it is now out of print and unavailable from used book dealers. Practically everybody who owns a copy of the book must have nominated it!

• Two nominees, by different authors, have the same title (Palimpsest by Catherynne M. Valente (Best Novel) and by Charles Stross (Best Novella)).

• Finally, not an oddity but a question: Fred Pohl is one of nature’s noblemen, and I’d be delighted to see him win a Hugo, but what fannish writing did he do in 2009? Has he been pubbish ishes, blogging somewhere, or what?

The deadline for voting in July 31st (open to Aussiecon members only). The four-month period to read the nominees is, I believe, the longest ever allowed. I may need all of it to track down that Swanwick volume.