I don’t get the Republican sense of humor:
Jason Thompson, the son of former [Wisconsin] Gov. Tommy Thompson, was caught on video Sunday suggesting at a Republican event that voters this fall could send President Barack Obama back “to Kenya.”
“We have the opportunity to send President Obama back to Chicago – or Kenya,” Jason Thompson, an attorney at Michael Best and Friedrich, said during a fall brunch hosted by the Kenosha County Republican Party.
Jason Thompson’s comment about Obama prompted laughs from the crowd, with one woman jokingly adding, “We are taking donations for that Kenya trip.”
For years, a fringe group of Obama critics has promoted the discredited “birther” argument that the first-term Democratic president was not born in the U.S. Though Obama’s father was Kenyan, the White House released Obama’s birth certificate last year showing he was born in a Hawaii hospital on Aug. 4, 1961.
Also speaking at the Kenosha event were Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Brad Courtney. The video was taken by a Democratic Party operative and posted at BuzzFeed Politics early Sunday evening.
I don’t think Jason Thompson is a secret birther. But that just makes his joke stranger for me. I see it as a racist joke. The only alternative would be if he were taking a tongue-in-cheek shot at his own party’s nutters. But the context really argues against that interpretation. Do Republicans think “Go Back to Africa” jokes are actually amusing?
