It's been four years.

June 9 may not have been the date that the central Birther rumor was created, but it was the date that the Birther phenomenon began.

It's also a model of unintended consequences. In trying to squelch rumors (and to be fair, they were successfully squelched among the mainstream for the remainder of the campaign), an entire rumor-based 'movement' was ultimately borne.

It's a pattern we saw repeated last year, when the White House released the long-form. In one sense, it was successful, in that it further marginalized Birthers as conspiratorial wackos. I'd like to think it destroyed sales on Corsi's book. It also provided one of the purest examples of denialists moving their goalposts; this was a movement whose motto was "Where's the Birth Certificate," where their gospel text even carried that title. They got precisely what they demanded, and they remained unsatisfied.

But as we've seen, even the White House's move had massive unintended consequences. Because Birthers did not merely move their goalposts beyond the long-form: they made the long-form the centerpiece of their claims of fraud. Look at Arpaio's Posse, and how much of that "investigation" is focused on treating the long-form as evidence in FAVOR of Birtherism. If the long-form hadn't been released, the Cold Case Posse would have looked a lot different, if it had existed at all.

As I sit here looking back over those four years, I'm honestly starting to feel burned out. And it seems like a number of the early top Birthers have already moved on. Phil Berg and Leo Donofrio are gone, some like Apuzzo are largely just online cranks. The 'movement' is now largely centered around Orly and WND, with Donald Trump being the much-ridiculed public face of Birtherism. Trump's interest is likely to fade with time, but Orly's going to stay crazy and WND's going to keep pushing so long as there's money to be made off gullible readers.

Finally, while we consider the past, maybe it's also worth thinking about the future. What do you suppose Birtherism will look like a year or two from now if Obama wins reelection? What do you suppose it will look like if he *doesn't*? What new surprises do you suppose Birtherism might produce before November? And if Romney picks Bobby Jindal as his running-mate, do you look forward to seeing Birther heads explode?

If Obama wins reelection, I expect more of the same in the way of lawsuits, perhaps even more quo warranto from some of the faux "candidates". Those will obviously be unsuccessful, but I expect them.

If he's reelected, and if somehow the Republicans maintain control of the House and whether they gain control of the Senate or not, I fully expect a congressional investigation to be initiated. I have no idea whether it will lead to a trial in the Senate but it would not surprise me. I think the opposition would rather engage in such nonsense than do their jobs running the country at that point.

If he's not reelected I expect some of the very hard core commenters on a few blogs to continue to spout their nbc nonsense and scream and yell and stomp their feet that the "issue" was never settled and that he was an illegal alien and everything he did should be undone and null and void. Won't happen, but that's what I expect from them. I think "most" of the bloggers will turn their attention elsewhere. WND will post the occasional article supporting the above meme if it returns a few bucks.

If Romney selects either Jindal or Rubio, indeed I expect birther heads to asplode and for all of birfer history to begin repeating itself in the courts and so on, which will be a boon to WND and other birther grifters. And no, I don't look forward to it and most likely will pay very, very little if any attention to it. In fact, if it were not for Orly's entertainment value and at this point waiting to see Irion tossed and hopefully admonished and/or sanctioned, and Arpaio's/Corsi's little swiftboating adventure play out, I'd be paying little attention now. Soon I may not even bother to follow those, at least with any regularity.

YMMV

Because I believe birferism to be a runaway political ploy, I believe that if a Republican is elected this time, it will almost completely die out. Neither Jindal nor Rubio will hold their attention for more than a political moment.

Look how quiet they were during Bush, after 6 non-stop years of Rush, loaded on OxyContin, and the rest impeaching Clinton in the court of public opinion over Troopergate, Whitewater, Monica. The instant the election whostruckjohn was over, they went back to sleep and only woke up when it looked like another Dem would win.

I'm just disgusted at the state of our politics. There's no such thing as a free market, the only thing Republicans* care about. Free elections are becoming a thing of the past as well.







* Leaders, not necessarily voters

I believe the election, whatever else comes, will be the high water mark of birther lunacy. After the election, if Rmoney wins, it will basically be irrelevant. You won't hear from most of these nutjobs again until the next Democrat gets elected, when they will have a new nutty conspiracy theory.

If Obama does get reelected, there will be a frenzy around that time period, but unlike this last four years, birthers will have nothing to work toward. There won't be a big event coming like another election. Give it two years and you will still have Orly and some of the most hardcore nuts doing whatever freakish activities they think will result in frogmarching, but less and less enthusiasm from the flying monkeys. Two years in, even the most dedicated flying monkeys will see that regardless of what happens, in two years, Obama will be gone. They will be resigned to it at that point.

There may be a few lone cranks and nutcases who continue even past that. That Obama was illegitimate will be subsumed into the vast corpus of idiot legal arguments made by paper terrorists, cropping up every now and again when some whacko tries to claim some Obama-era legislation is invalid because it was signed by a usurper. It will be otherwise over.



I don't believe this. They're Republicans. That's all any of this is about. Except for some hardcore racists and maybe a couple principled birthers (if there is such a thing), any Democrat is automatically illegitimate and must be removed by any means, legal or illegal. Any Republican, good.

There will probably be a smattering of Rubio or Jindal birthers, but the RWNJ bloggers will tell them to STFU and mercilessly purge them if they emit so much as a peep of birfing, just as RimJob has on Freepland.

If the President is re-elected I see birtherism continuing. How it continues depends largely if there are sanctions against Taitz and van Irion. There are only a few birther attorneys and even Orly stopped her military lawsuits after being sanctioned in Georgia. If there aren't sanctions, I think everything old will be new again plus maybe a few new conspiracies. I think that the big goal of the birthers will be to gain an objection to the vote count and failing that have a Cao moment.

If there are sanctions though (I know, I know ) I think there will be a shift from lawsuits that do nothing to "investigations" that do nothing like the Cold Case Posse. It's been months and only a few birthers have noticed that all Sheriff Joe has done is hold press conferences. I can see WND easily keeping up the charade for another four years.

If Obama isn't re-elected, I expect a few birthers to grumble if Rubio or Jindal become VP. I suspect more will find some magic way of accepting them with some sort of warped reasoning like that somehow Cuba was a protectorate of the United States and that makes Rubio a NBC or perhaps just ignore the contradiction entirely. I do expect that much like Hillary Clinton, Obama will be a boogeyman on places the fringe right for years to come and it will be common knowledge there that the entire Presidency was a sham but because of a fear of race riots the real history is kept from the America by a complicit communist media. Past that, I agree with Kate that it will quiet down.

I expect that most of the lawsuits will dry up in that case, though I expect regardless of whether Obama's Presidency ends in 2013 or 2017, there will be fringe lawsuits for decades along the lines of Strunk in Esse. I still worry that birthers might egg an unstable individual on regardless of the outcome of the November election.

I'm afraid i am rather less sanguine about Birfoon responses assuming the President is re-elected.

The bottled up bile, racism and hatred, which is currently being partiality ameliorated by venting in the perennial OMG ANY...DAY....NOW failathon will patently be show to be the cack it us. These people are too invested in their view of reality will BELIEVE that the NWO/Illuminati/delusion de jour have taken their America away by theft and will feel it is their duty to do something

we know that the vast majority of these fuckers are cowardly vermin, there are however sufficient crazies that IMHO we should not be suprised to see the egging on of armed "lone wolf/wolves"

The Secret Servuces activity will need to be seriously ramped up.

Considering how many birthers think that President Obama "stole" the 2008 election, his re-election will just be seen as "proof" and that he's planning on staging some coup to install him as President for Life.

Right now a good chunk of the birthers are just waiting to see Obama turned out of office after a single term. If he's re-elected, the prospect of having Obama as president for four MORE years may be too much for some of them to take.

Expect the death threats, calls for coups and military revolt, and calls for armed uprisings to continue. And I wouldn't be surprised to be more open and blatant racism AND open and blatant calls for someone to "take the usurper out".

I expect the birthers to die out when Obama leaves office, except for a few die-hards who will be trying to erase his entire presidency. But I expect them to ratchet things up during a second term

Two years from now, regardless who is President, I suspect birthism will be a distant memory for all except a few birthers and those who laughed at them. The birthers who have invested 4 years of emotion into the two citizen parent nonsense and their doubts about the birth certificate will not be able to admit they were wrong. They will be tormented by Washington DC Republicans who won't give them anything except form letters, if that. The GOP in 2014 will be concentrated on House and Senate elections and will give birthers the same attention they give them now, none.

If Pres Obama is re-elected birthers can continue to whine on internet forums about anything he does or says. Should Rmoney win they can whine on internet forums that Rmoney lacks the spine to remove two Supreme Court Justices. The result for either scenario will be the same. No one will pay birthers any attention.

Any ballot challenges will be quickly dismissed as moot and any other birther lawsuits will be faced with the same standing requirements they couldn't overcome in earlier attempts.

In the meantime POTUS tweeted this a few minutes ago.

https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/ ... 05/photo/1

Birferz and RWNJ's in general are convinced that upon reelection, the commie socialist usurperin' evil Obama will have no further need to win reelection and will therefore pull out all the stops and rain destruction and damnation to all that is good about 'Murica. Disaster is upon us and all necessary means to avert it are only common sense.

Need more work to have plenty of FEMA camp billets available.

With today being the four-year mark for the release of the COLB, I've uploaded this and posted it to my blog: a concise PDF index of 20 official and historical documents attesting to Obama's Hawaiian birth.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/96756764/Bara ... -in-Hawaii

Oh, that's awesome, Loren.