Afterbirchers

This summer has been the hottest in California for several years, and as I like to say, it's not the heat, it's the stupidity. Mediawise, it's enough to make one reminiscent for the Summer of the Shark -- except, of course, for what finally knocked all those stupid shark-attack stories off the front page.

But seriously, just the past six weeks has been epic in terms of absolutely useless, meaningless crap being presented as news -- a wave of celebrity deaths culminating in that of the still-dead, still-unburied Michael Jackson; a preening, know-nothing shopaholic pretending to be the governor of a state, pretending to quit yet pretending that she's not really quitting, apparently buying her enough time and funds to purchase a large-enough mountable cross to tow around the country with her; a Bahston cop and a crusading black egghead pushing each other just a little too far, and the president who stepped on his dick when he didn't even need to walk in on the contrived "issue". And which bar skank is getting Jon Gosselin's manchowder written across her tramp stamp tonight? Hope he stocked up on Valtrex!

Ahem. That's an awful lot of stupid to compete against, and yet the "birther" story easily trumps them. Conspiracy theories are a time-honored American parlor game, to be sure, but they're more interesting when there's at least one (1) detail about them that makes sense, or is irrefutable. What made, say, the Vince Foster conspiracy theory interesting was not that there was any credibility to the notion that the Clintons actually had Foster killed, it was that they did send HRC flunky (and 2008 campaign manager after Patti Solis Doyle got shoved overboard) Maggie Williams over to Foster's place to grab a box of documents immediately upon hearing of Foster's death. It was a case where, even though the conspiracy was outlandish, the information revealed about the participants' first instincts was, at best, unseemly.

With the birther weirdos, it's the opposite -- the persistence of the nonsense reveals too much about the idiots perpetuating it. The more evidence available to refute their theory, the greater the conspiracy in their minds. Of course this is true of all conspiracies, by definition, but perhaps never before has such a grain of rumor managed to travel so far, aided and abetted as always by the sheer laziness of the media, of clowns like Lou Dobbs, who has been refuted by his own network, and by his own guest hosts on his own show, yet still persists in feeding the zombie lie.

It's the Paranoid Style all over again, the dumbest goddamn thing since the Birchers' "commies fluoridatin' the water supply" schtick fifty years ago. Except this time around, the wingnuts have had lots of help mainstreaming their obsession. No Richard Cougar Melloncamp Scaife bankrolling this one, folks, this and other foolishness is kept going by outlets like CNN, who spend actual studio time reading aloud the e-mail and twitter comments they receive on this and other non-stories, and then wonder why they've lost legitimacy.