Doc, I know it scares you libs, but this is what it will [come] to very soon if your [messiah] does not release the information.
There will be rioting in the streets. There will be a forceful overtaking of the government. The will of the people will not be denied.
– March 4, 2009
– Comment at Obama Conspiracy Theories
An article could be written, taking quite a few hours effort, to catalog the birther meme of “any day now,” the imminent victory of the birthers just around the corner. This isn’t that article. I just want to ruminate a little on the subject. The commenter Heavy who is quoted above was a frequent visitor to this site in the early days and he always said that the doom of the Obots was nigh. Soon other commenters began replying with the phrase “any day now.” Four years later, not much has changed. Heavy never would get specific about what “very soon” meant, but I can hardly imagine that it encompassed the second term of President Obama.
Jerome Corsi picked up the theme, saying that the Obots wouldn’t be around much longer. He said on his Facebook wall back in 2011:
The Obots are on the run.
Nowadays, we have other commenters, such as Hermitian, who carry on the sense of urgency, such as this from today:
Will the rats begin to flee in two weeks?
– May 20, 2013
– Comment at Obama Conspiracy Theories
Lots of things fueled birther expectations (it doesn’t take much). I don’t keep track of these carefully—I think of them as water under the bridge. (Some folks have longer memories for such things.) A few that do pop into my mind are:
- The Xxx v. Yyy lawsuit (207 included by reference)
- Quo warranto, qui tam, et al.
- Citizen grand juries (americangrandjury.org is offline today)
- Birther bills
- Larry Klayman
- Terry Lakin’s defiance
- Ed Hale’s documents of the Obama divorce and others
- Donald Trumps investigators in Hawaii
- Jerome Corsi’s mole in the Hawaii Department of Health
- Various fake Kenyan birth certificates
- Joe Arpaio’s “investigation” and promises of evidence
- Zullo’s affidavit before the Alabama Supreme Court
I can’t look at this topic without remembering the few thousand predictions of the second coming of Jesus, most of which have passed by uneventfully. That has its own article, “The Long Form and the Great Disappointment.” The ability to slough off repeated disappointment, barely noticing it, is cognitive dissonance.
The birthers think that they are about to win and the the Obots are in fear and panic. The fact that they do not win, and the Obots do, does not affect their behavior. The Obots on the other hand quickly learned that birthers are perennial , and we don’t expect them to change or to go away, but rather we expect them to persist in vain hopes, with perhaps some decrease in activity once Obama leaves office, or some new conspiracy occupies their attention. Obama’s re-election does remove any sense of urgency that ever existed to oppose the birthers. There was always a faint hope that in a close election (it wasn’t) the birthers might just tip the scales. In my mind the game is over and now I mostly look back and think about the highlights. In practical terms, there’s no incentive to spend hours on one debunking of some birther nonsense, and I’m pretty much out of that business. The birthers don’t know that the game is over, and are busily moving the goalposts.
I must admit, though, that it is rather irritating to win and for the other side not to acknowledge it.