Some people need to leave the basement more often

Saturday morning. C-SPAN. Ten minutes into "Washington Journal" and the tin foil hats come out. It's as predictable as the sun rising in the east or the air being unbreathable in Atlanta in July. (And the S.O. just pointed out that it's just as predictable that if it's the weekend I'll do a post about the tin foil hats. So I'm a creature of habit. There are worse things to blog about.) Anyway, this morning once again the reich wing wackaloons are trotting out The Birth Certificate. Or the supposed lack thereof.

I'm not sure which is more hilarious -- the notion that some radical Islamic sleeper cell cleverly arranged for Obama's birth back in the 1960s and carefully manipulated his life so he'd be in just the right place to be elected President in 2008, which is the most elaborate of the fantasies I've heard spun out in C-SPAN calls, or the simpler fantasy that at some point after Obama began his political career the original birth certificate showing a purported birth in a foreign country vanished and a forged one appeared. Which, I assume, also included going around the world finding every single micro fiche copy of the Honolulu paper from that time period and substituting doctored microfilm that included the birth announcement.

Then again, I have a hunch quite a few of the wackaloons are totally convinced Hawaii itself is a foreign country so it doesn't actually matter where Obama was born -- the key thing is they don't like him for purely visceral reasons (he's black and he's smarter than they are) so there's got to be something they can use as an excuse. I can understand the impulse. Obama's predecessor made my skin crawl. Fortunately, when it came to finding rational reasons to dislike a politician, aWol provided plenty of ammunition. No one had to go all the way back to hovering over Barbara Bush in the delivery room to come up with stuff to use for Bush-bashing; we had lovely recent material like the "My Pet Goat" video. Although, of course, it would have been so much more fun if it had involved aWol with a goat instead of just reading about one, but, despite intriguing rumors, we never got that lucky.