Is Mitt Romney A Unicorn? Arizona Secretary Of State’s Birther Probe Ridiculed (Update)8
inShare.share close StumbleUpon Instapaper Reddit digg Nick R. Martin- May 22, 2012, 5:20 PM 12306In case there was any doubt about it before: The man in charge of running Arizona’s elections has no plans to investigate Mitt Romney’s birth certificate the way he’s been looking into President Obama’s.
“No, we haven’t contacted Michigan,” a spokesman for Secretary of State Ken Bennett told TPM in an email on Tuesday. “I don’t know if Michigan has the same statute that Hawaii has.”
Since he first revealed his conspiracy theory-fueled investigation into Obama’s birth certificate and threatened last week to keep the president off the state’s ballot, Bennett and his staff have been ducking for political cover behind the people they say really started it: the 1,200 constituents who sent angry emails begging him to take up their cause.
It was only because of them, Bennett said, that he began to look into the birth certificate issue in the first place. His spokesman, Matt Roberts, told TPM “with complete and utter honesty” it has nothing to do with Bennett’s affiliation as a Republican or his role as Romney’s Arizona campaign co-chair.
But those excuses apparently didn’t sit well with the legions of the president’s supporters and others convinced by clear evidence that Obama really is a natural born citizen of the United States and therefore eligible to serve as president.
“The reaction has been largely negative since the story broke,” Roberts said. It “balanced out the thousands of people who advocated for Mr. Bennett to keep (Obama) off the ballot in the first place.”
Balanced is one term for it. Tipped the scales might be another. At least one progressive online network, Left Action, took up the cause this week under the theory that if 1,200 emails can convince Bennett to investigate one conspiracy theory, maybe they can cobble together enough support to get him to investigate anything.
As of Tuesday afternoon some 15,000 people and counting had already put their names on Left Action’s online petition asking Bennett to investigate whether Mitt Romney is really a unicorn. (Yes, a unicorn. The petition even has its own domain name: MittRomneyIsAUnicorn.com.) That’s more than 10 times the number of people who asked Bennett to investigate the president in the first place.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.c ... rizona.php