The Birthers Got Nothin' On Me

Once again, despite my best efforts, I have allowed information about politics to enter my brain. I would blame my wife and her habit of putting on MSNBC when we go to bed, but that doesn't work because a) she's not forcing me to listen to it and b)my wife has no natural faults, and blaming her for something suggests otherwise. Regardless of how this came to pass, I'm forced to face yet another mountain of ignorance, this time in the form of "birthers".

Birthers, for those whose wives do not control the remote at bedtime, are the group who insist that Barack Obama is not qualified to be President of the USA because he is not a natural born citizen. Some claim they'll be quiet when they see his birth certificate (the link is his Certificate of Live Birth, which is apparently something else). Others claim even that won't change things, because his father was not a citizen, so that disqualifies him.

I'm not going to sit here and pick these people apart for the same reason that I don't pick on my daughter for believing in fairies: the sensible among us know better, and we're the majority. Rather, I'm kind of wondering at how something like this gains traction. We've discussed individual yahoos before, but really, what does it take for these loons to unite into a full blown...I'm not sure what the proper term is for a group of yahoos. A flock? A bushel? An asylum? Yes, that sounds right. What does it take for a weird idea to amass a full blown asylum of yahoos to argue for it?

Things like this always resurface my temptation to start a completely unfounded rumor here on DLOG, just to see how far I could get it. Originally I was going to go for something in the movie industry. Speculation on Batman villains is always a hot topic (Neil Patrick Harris as the Riddler - you heard it here first). Now, however, I'm thinking of something more nefarious. I mean, at this point these people seem willing to believe anything, so I could really go to town, and as long as it get's picked up by the right yahoo, we could be making history here.

Tomorrow on DLOG: I'm pretty sure Barack Obama has a tattoo on his left butt cheek of Stalin sitting on a throne with his feet on the back of Ronald Reagan dressed in a gimp suit with a ball-gag in his mouth, and I refuse to believe otherwise until he gives an address that involves him mooning the entire press corps.