Archive | April, 2011

This isn’t going away!

By Dr. Conspiracy on April 1, 2011 in 2012 Presidential Election, Birther Politics, Donald Trump, Lounge

No news there. Salon.com told us so, way back in December of 2008, in their article: Why the conspiracy theories about Barack Obama will never die. Birthers commenting here and elsewhere proudly proclaim, “this isn’t going away!” They’ll get no argument from me.

Only now the worm has turned. “This isn’t going away” is no longer a mantra of hope and comfort for a battered minority of conspiracy theorists, no longer is a phrase that makes me turn to the sky and ask “when do I get my life back?” Now that birtherism has gone mainstream with “credible” (and I use the term lightly) Republican presidential candidates like Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann raising the birther banner, “this isn’t going away” is no longer a real or imaginary cloud looming over the Obama administration; it has become a sword of Damocles hanging above the Republican party. Karl Rove describes the birth certificate as “Barack Obama’s trap”. It’s like watching the lemmings¹ follow each over off the cliff and into the sea if you really don’t like lemmings. Abandon hope, birthers; the world knows about you now and your movement has no clothes. This isn’t going away.

¹Lemmings don’t really follow one another off cliffs and into the sea. That’s an urban legend. However, in the very excellent video game Lemmings, they do. Now that’s a great idea for a video game: Lemmings vs Zombies.

MSNBC v Trump

By Dr. Conspiracy on April 1, 2011 in 2012 Presidential Election, Birthers, Debunking, Donald Trump, Media

I am fully and completely tired of Donald Trump and his birther phase, and having to write about it. Finally, a few in the media are starting to wake up and smell the [expletive deleted]. Credit to Bill O’Reilly for his derisive Fox News interview with Trump. CNN’s Lisa Costello called him a joke (video).

Now MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell takes a closer look at the particulars in Trump’s recitation of rumors he got off the Internet, and concludes that Trump should spend time fact checking instead of on his hair. Sarcasm aside, the MSNBC piece is really well done and factually accurate. I learned something.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

American idiot

By Dr. Conspiracy on April 1, 2011 in Birthers, The Blogs

One of the most intellectually offensive web sites that I occasionally visit (because people send me links) is the American Thinker. The articles there have a literate writing style and the web site looks like a commercial news site. Yet amid an attractive context, one finds utter idiocy. Case in point:

The left has painted “birthers” as racists, nuts, and paranoids. What gets left out of the equation is: one, Obama has spent millions of dollars on attorneys protecting his birth certificate; two, Obama apparently traveled to Pakistan in 1981 when Americans were banned from going there; …

Idiot: n. Anyone who still believes in a 1981 US – Pakistan travel ban.

Readers here should know by now that Barack Obama hasn’t spend millions of dollars protecting his birth certificate and they know that there never was any kind of a travel ban to Pakistan in 1981. The former is a rumor proved false by a simple analysis of what cases Obama was actually named in, and what his attorneys actually did, coupled with the total lack of evidence the rumor has a basis in fact. The travel ban is proved false by contemporary State Department documents and articles in the newspaper of Americans visiting Pakistan.

Nothing but praise for Donald Trump’s recent birther outbursts:

And this is why Trump needs to keep raising the birth certificate issue. He shouldn’t stop even when the left ridicules him.

It looks to me that the right is doing the ridiculing. The left is just enjoying the show.

The spew of anti-liberal stereotypes is outside the subject area of this blog, but I will mention the invocation of the name of the right-wing bugbear, Alinsky.

The author, “Robin of Berkeley” is self described as a “recovering liberal” but I would describe Robin as a terminally-ill conservative myself.