This is insane.

I really didn't want to post anything on the three ring circus going on in the media over The Birth Certificate. To me, its always just been about a bunch of right wing nut jobs trying to grab headlines by pandering to a hard core of bigots. Bigots who just can't handle a black man in the White House doing anything but clearing away the dishes after dinner. As one pundit noted, the issue of foreign birth is just code for ordinary racism.

Another pundit pointed out this dog and pony show has become a national shame. After producing exhaustive, irrefutable evidence of American birth, the President had to go on national TV and present the public with a copy of the original document. And all the perverse miscreants who fanned the flames are now strutting around like proud peacocks, as if they have accomplished something, when all they've really done is give America another humiliating episode to live down.

In another sense, by forcing a good and honest man to lower himself to respond to this inane, fake crisis, what they've actually done is lowered the nation as a whole. If any of them had the slightest sense of moral dignity they would know this. But they don't. It embarrasses me to live in the same country with them.

Like I said, I didn't want to waste your time and mine calling these birthers out for the ignorant fools they are. But I came across another article which seems to add a whole new dimension to this disgusting mess.

According to Joseph Farah, World Net Daily intends to proceed with publishing a book by the muck raking, ethically challenged yahoo, Jerome Corsi, entitled: "Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President".

Huh? Steve, we know where the birth certificate is now. Why proceed with this idiotic screed? Well according to Farah: blah blah blah blah, and, "... the real issue (now) is that Obama is still not eligible to be president because his father was Kenyan and his adopted father was Indonesian, making him a potential “dual citizen” of two separate foreign countries.".

In other words, having lost the entire impetus for producing this book, Mr. Farah invents and adds a new Article to the U.S. Constitution as a bizarre form of justification. It makes no sense. It has no basis in reality, or even passing acquaintance with logic or reason.

But what I find flatly stunning is that this book will probably sell like hot cakes anyway: an outcome which at first seemed nearly as incomprehensible to me as Boolean algebra.

Then it came to me. The issue of Barak Obama's citizenship is not really a conspiracy theory after all. Conspiracy theories deal with real people supposedly performing real acts and manipulating tangible objects in the same space/time you and I inhabit. Take away these components and what have left is pretty much bupkis. It would be like saying John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Daffy Duck, or Jack The Ripper was Foghorn Leghorn in real life. See what I mean?

But why would a person spend $14.25 for a book which amounts to pretty much nothing?

I think I know why.

I think it is because when some people want to believe something bad enough, facts no longer matter. Oh sure, maybe on some barely conscious level, they may know their "facts" don't square with reality, and that bothers them. Yet in the end, its not important how they justify what they believe, but that they believe it.

This conscious effort to re-order reality to fit a belief is nothing new. But you know, I don't think I've ever seen first hand a mass expression of it on so large a scale. Which makes me wonder if maybe the highest form of self delusion is not to distort reality - but to ignore it altogether.