The Greatest Issue of our Time is Resolved–Again!

Obama produces proof he was born in the US–again.

Of course, the birther nuts will not be satisfied because nuts are, well, nuts.

It’s like the guy in the mental ward who insisted he was dead. A new intern at the ward decided to prove him wrong. So he asked the man, “Do dead people bleed?”

“No,” the lunatic replied. “They don’t.”

The intern then produced a pin and pricked the lunatic’s finger which promptly dripped blood.

“What do you think now?” said the intern with satisfaction.

“Well, what do you know! Dead people *do* bleed!” said the lunatic.

I am completely certain that the birther nuts will have an analogous response to this latest attempt by the White House to reason with nuts. They’ve already decided, in advance of the evidence and in the teeth of common sense, that Obama was not born in the US. It’s child’s play for such nuts to posit that this form was faked by a sinister gov’t conspiracy. After all, he’s president. If he can print money, he can certainly order the printing of a fake long form, they will say. And so nothing will be resolved, just as the people who have convinced themselves that he is a Muslim will not be dissuaded from this crazy notion no matter his confession of Jesus as risen “Lord and Savior” last week. Some ingenious way to prove that secret undercover Muslims routinely confess Jesus as Lord and Savior to fool the masses will be found, because lunatics have nothing left but their reason, untrammeled by common sense and all the other cues that reality gives us.

Kathy Shaidle suspects that proneness to conspiracy theories of the “Bush Engineered 9/11 / Obama was not born in the US / JFK was assassinated by Elvis” variety are a form of mental illness. I think she’s right. In a world where things are going wrong on a lot of fronts, it’s easy to want to pin everything on some shadowy conspiracy all being engineered by One Man or a small group. It makes life manageable for people who can’t cope with the idea that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. It also gives the rewarding sense that you have the inside track to the Hidden History of Our Time, which renders you rather a cut above the common herd.

Oh, another thing that will happen too will be arch questions like, “Why are you defending Obama?” from the lunatic fringe when you note that birther nuts and “Obama is secretly Muslim” nuts are nuts.

The answer to this question is simple: “Love does not rejoice in evil, but rejoices with the truth.” I don’t think it’s either necessary or good for opponents of Obama’s policies to cling like limpets to lunatic lies in order to defeat his bad policies. I think this for three reasons: 1) because truth doesn’t need the assistance of lies in order to triumph; 2) because clinging to lunatic lies in the teeth of the evidence turns you into a lunatic liar; and 3) because a yowling pack of lunatic liars and conspiracy theorists who go on braying about this just makes the job easier for the Obama 2012 campaign. Obama is a canny enough pol to know that when your opponent is destroying himself, you don’t stop him. Birther nuts are a gift from God to Obama.

The problem for Obama, of course, is that some of us think this silly distraction does not let Nobel Peace Prize Winner off the hook for bleeding our economy white or expanding the war machine.