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.