Lou Dobbs is proving to be a huge embarrassment for CNN. This time, he may have finally gone too far.
Over the past couple weeks, Dobbs has taken up the cause of the extremist “birthers.” Those are the far right-wingers who claim Barack Obama wasn’t born in America, and, thus, isn’t constitutionally qualified to be President. Most of the birther talk has been limited to FOX and right-wing radio. But, Dobbs has jumped in with both feet.
Today, the Southern Poverty Law Center, noting the racist underpinnings of the “birther” movement, asked CNN’s President, Jonathan Klein, to fire Dobbs:
As he has in several other instances, Mr. Dobbs, in taking up the birthers’ claims, is adopting an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that originated on the radical racist right. As Gawker.com has reported, this particular conspiracy theory was first developed by an open anti-Semite and circulated by right-wing extremists who cannot accept the fact that a black man has been elected President of the United States. Among its adherents was neo-Nazi James von Brunn, the alleged murderer of a security guard at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., this June. Von Brunn had helped spread the birthers’ claims on the Internet and attacked the “dishonest & conspiratorial Media” for not taking them up.
