A Dose of Their Own Wingnut Medicine

Yeah, yeah, yeah.Two birther posts in two days. It may seem a little like overkill, but I've got to admit I find this all fascinating. What's especially entertaining about it is watching the conservative establishment realize what kind of nuts they have in their base. The bullheaded, willful ignorance of your average wingnut has always been something the right has counted on. From family planning to gays to economics to evolution to global warming, the right has relied on the base to be positively unbudgeable. They won't give an inch, no matter how absurd and ridiculous their position is proven to be. They're like a rock, both in their unchanging nature and their intellect. The Republican party has relied on persistently gullible fools for years and now it's finally caught up with them.

We can see this in establishment conservatives begging the nuts to knock it off. This whole Obama birth certificate thing is killing them.

Hey guys, welcome to my world. You've let these nuts run loose, making asses of themselves on just about every issue there is, while applauding them for their ignorance. Yeah, they sure do stick to their guns, don't they? As long as they were out there repeating your lies, you were cool with it. But now that they've come up with lies of their own... well, that's a different story, isn't it? And you're finally learning just how relentlessly annoying these intellectual lightweights of yours can be.





First to give a shot at straightening out the nuts is the editorial board of the Reaganaut flagship, National Review:

Pres. Barack Obama has a birthday coming up, a week from Tuesday. We hope he takes the day off -- or even the whole week, the briefest of respites from his busy schedule of truncating our liberties while exhausting both the public coffers and our patience. The president’s birthday comes to mind because we recently spent some time looking at a photograph of his birth certificate, being held by Joe Miller of Factcheck.org, who took the time to examine it. President Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m, in Honolulu County, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. The serial number on his birth certificate is 010641. Baby Barack’s birth was not heralded, as some of his partisans have suggested, by a star in the east, but it was heralded by the Honolulu Star, as well as the Honolulu Advertiser, each of which published birth announcements for young Mr. Obama.

Wow. So you just lay out the facts, huh? Good luck with that. It's not like no one's ever tried that with evolution or global warming or homosexuality as a "lifestyle choice." Trust me, the facts don't matter and this isn't going to work. We've collected one hundred years worth of evidence for evolution, yet there's a big museum outside Cincinnati with displays of dinosaurs with saddles on them. We're watching sea ice recede and you've got people convinced the earth is actually cooling. It's a little late for the right to start expecting their base to give a damn about the facts. And it's a little surprising that you think the facts will make any difference at all. We already tried that, geniuses.

Next up is Bill Pascoe for CQ Politics:

As one of the GOP operatives whose job it was to defeat Barack Obama in a campaign for federal office (there have only been three GOP campaigns run against him, and I've been involved with two of them), I can attest to the fact that nowhere in our opposition research did we find any reason to believe that the man was not a natural born citizen of the United States.

He points out that one of the lead birthers, Alan Keyes, once ran against Obama in an Illinois Senate race and never brought all this birth certificate crap up. And, unlike NR's editorial board, Pascoe's not above begging. "Seriously," he says. "Is this anything but a gift to the Democrats?"

"Reasonable and responsible conservatives... are stuck," Pascoe writes. "We are being lumped in with irresponsible and unreasonable conspiracy theorists."

Now why would people do that? It's so unfair. Just because you guys have jumped on every anti-fact bandwagon since Goldwater lost -- from denying tobacco was bad for you to denying that there was a problem with having a hole in the ozone layer -- people are lumping you in with the kooks who refuse to concede the facts on this issue. How terribly, terribly unjust.

After training these people to charge ahead, facts be damned, for decade after decade, the right is finally forced to deal with the monster they've created -- a stupid, lumbering, stubborn idiot of a problem that's finally come back to bite them in the ass. Throw all the facts you want at them, throw any argument you like. Nothing will work, because decades of intellectual inbreeding have made them immune to logic and reason. I wish the right luck, because if they figure out how to deal with them, we'll see how it's done.

But I'm not holding my breath. So far, they're trying everything we've tried for years -- facts, logic, the written record of history, the weight of the evidence, etc. That's not going to work.

So there you go Dr. Frankenstein. It's your turn to fight with your monster. Don't expect me to feel sorry for you.

-Wisco


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