“However — and please answer this, and without the dodge once again: WHY do you waste your time on a case that your side believes will GO NOWHERE?”
Why?
Because Birtherism is a blight on and an embarassment to American conservatism. Birtherism is to the Right what 9/11 Trutherism is to the Left: an irrational, logical fallacy-ridden, politically-motivated, universally-derided conspiracy theory. When reporters want shorthand for conspiracy-minded nutty conservatives, they cite Birthers. When liberals want to smear Republican candidates as unhinged, they accuse them of being Birthers. Birtherism is to Constitutional Law what Holocaust denial is to 20th century history, what creationism is to science, and what homeopathy is to medicine; denialist claptrap wrapped with a layer of perceived inconsistencies, imagined conspiracies, and outright lies.
Birtherism is an endless fount of fallacy, illogic, and unattainable standards of proof. After a blogger first fabricated the rumor that Obama was born in Kenya and not Hawaii, conspiracy theorists such as yourself demanded to see a birth certificate. When Obama’s campaign published the COLB online for anyone to see, conspiracy theorists such as yourself moved the goalpost further, fell back on the testimony of fake, lying “experts” and accused it of being forged, and asked that it be personally inspected. When FactCheck sent a couple of staff members to handle and photograph the document, conspiracy theorists such as yourself moved the goalpost further and accused FactCheck of being in on the conspiracy, and asked for external evidence of a Hawaiian birth. When contemporary birth announcements were found in the Honolulu newspapers, conspiracy theorists such as yourself moved the goalpost further and accused the Obama family of having been engaged in conspiratorial efforts to cover up a Kenyan birth for the last 50 years, and asked for the state of Hawaii to confirm his birth. When officials from the state of Hawaii publicly went on record as saying that his vital records confirm his birth in Hawaii, conspiracy theorists such as yourself moved the goalpost further and claimed that the Hawaiian officials were not credible. It’s a neverending game of creating new standards of proof, new conspiratorial relationships, and new reasons for denying a truth that you refuse to accept. These are the tools of denialists, and conservatism does not need to be riddled with or associated with denialists.
Many people “waste their time” debunking 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Many people “waste their time” debating creationists. Many people “waste their time” responding to the allegations of various pseudoscientists and pseudohistorians, for any number of reasons. In my own past, I’ve “wasted my time” on Confederate apologists ( http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/2009/04/24/collinsed_0424.html ) and huckster salesmen ( http://www.lorencollins.net/trudeau/ ). Whether I or anyone else spends our time arguing against these things doesn’t change the fact that these things are nonsense; but nonsense is often contagious, and sometimes there’s the urge to step up and fight back against people being fed lies, logical fallacies, and bad law.
You, by contrast, waste your time endlessly promoting a conspiracy theory so absurd that pundits like Glenn Beck and Ann Coulter think it’s ridiculous, leaving only nuts like Alex Jones as supporters. A conspiracy theory so fringe that its proponents leap to claim every pundit who makes a joke as a supporter, and pretend that every no-name foreign journalist who makes a factual error is actually speaking the secret truth. A conspiracy theory so utterly *silly* that it’s not even treated by most skeptics as worthy of detailed rebuttal; while the 9/11 Truther analogy is convenient, Birtherism has almost as much in common with David Icke’s ‘The world is secretly ruled by reptilians’ nonsense, in that it’s just shrugged off as not even worth the effort to tackle. The public, press, and politicians don’t ignore Birtherism’s claims because they’re afraid of them; they ignore them because Birtherism’s claims are just really, really STUPID. Birthers advance a sweeping conspiracy starting in 1961, encompassing hundreds if not thousands of actors on both sides of the political spectrum and around the world, and involving everything from secret international trips to fraudulent registrations to elaborate forgeries to media coverups to scrubbed videos to novel legal theories.
And of course, everything from the lack of supporting evidence to the lack of legal support from legitimate legal scholars is all chalked up to being part of the conspiracy too. All rather than to simply accept that, like it or not, Barack Obama is the legal President of the United States.
The longer that such a conspiracy theory, such a stupid, stupid conspiracy theory, remains associated with conservatism, the harder it will be to rehabilitate conservatism in the eyes of the American voter. Worse yet, Birther rhetoric of hanging (and worse yet, hanging from a tree) is disturbing in its violent imagery. Conservatism is about finding answers through caution, logic, and reasoned analysis, rather than in rashness, emotion, and logical fallacies. Birtherism fully subscribes to the latter and is entirely bereft of the former. Birtherism’s approach to evidence is unscientific in the extreme; evidence that disagrees with your predetermined conclusion is deemed fraudulent or perpetually insufficient or is simply ignored, and the lack of evidence supporting your conclusion is always chalked up to the conspiracy.
William F. Buckley, the spirit of 20th century intellectual conservatism, would be aghast at the existence of Birtherism. His approach to the Birchers is the same approach today’s Republican Party should take with the Birthers. And I “waste my time” because I’d much rather stand with Buckley and embrace his legacy than silently tolerate the toxic effect of folks like Orly Taitz and Phil Berg.
