They say it's wrong, but it feels so right!

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Yep. This is all about further mockery at the expense of those people who are afraid that the brown, illegal aliens will descend upon the continental US in their brown helicopters and impose common sense, tolerance and affordable, single-payer health care upon the screaming masses still reeling from fluoridation, integration and affirmative action.

I so cannot take these people seriously anymore. I mean, yes, they ARE potentially dangerous lunatics who are certainly not to be considered to be safe to have around firearms, explosives or impressionable children. But I'm Goddamn done with treating their manufactured little "concerns" as if they were issues that would actually matter to people who had the capacity to think for themselves.

William Rivers Pitt of Truthout has some thoughts on it. He thinks in words, so, rather than translate from "t-shirt," I'll let him get the ball rolling.

The rank absurdity of the Birthers' contentions hasn't kept a whole array of high-ranking Republicans from jumping into the fray to endorse the validity of this farce. "Indeed," reported Talking Points Memo on Wednesday, "prominent Congressional Republicans were openly entertaining this stuff. A bill to require birth certificates from presidential candidates has picked up 11 total co-sponsors; Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) declared that the Birthers 'have a point,' and that he doesn't discourage it. Even House GOP Vice Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington), a member of the leadership, was saying she wanted to see the documents."

But here's the funny part. Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, right-wing bombthrower Ann Coulter and GOP Chairman Michael Steele - three people who have repeatedly set the standard for Deranged Things Actually Said In Public - have been working overtime to kill the Birther debate because they think it's stupid. They think it's stupid. Memo to the Far Right: when you've lost the support of people like O'Reilly, Coulter and Steele, you have to step back and wonder just how far from the pack you've strayed.

Elsewhere on the goofball spectrum, a couple of prominent right-wingers accused President Obama and the Democrats of being racists. Yes, they actually did. Fox News commentator Glenn Beck called Obama a racist for coming down on the side of Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. during the recent flap over his arrest. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) blasted Senate Democrats for - get this - using Sonya Sotomayor's race to divide the American people. Democrats, according to Cornyn, have been "giving cover to groups and individuals to nurture racial grievances for political advantage."

This puts us comparatively sane people in a strange position - of having to recognize that certain members of the wingnut media are actually behaving more responsibly - or at least, less reprehensibly - than actual Republican members of Congress.



Yeah, you heard that right. Ann Coulter thinks birthers are "cranks." (And the freepers are howling for her blood for this BLASPHEMY!) While I think many things of Coulter, I don't think she's stupid. I think she's quite aware of the fine line between being controversial and being... ridiculous. I think it likely that she's concerned that she might be confused in the mind of the public with this woman, Orly Taitz.

So, one of the many, many amusements of this week is seeing Coulter sputter about another blond republican being a "crank" for holding views that Sen. Jim Inhofe finds credible. Of course, as the White House Press Secretary wryly observed, he also thinks global warming is "a hoax."

Now, I don't know if it's my time spent as a mental health consumer or my training in Logic and Rhetoic. Goodness, perhaps it's my reading of the Associated Press Style Guide, in which I learned that You Can't Just Make Shit Up And Publish It.

But clearly, many members of the public, the media and even congress are of the opinion that if you say something loud enough, it will become true. That if you want something to be true enough, it IS true. And any "concern" that is put on television, no matter how ill-founded, malicious or fictional, no matter how clearly self-serving nor how directly connected to political operatives deserves to be treated with all the due consideration once accorded to the moments when Walter Cronkite took off his glasses.