Static
Politico is reporting how the “birther” movement is causing trouble for Republicans in getting their message out. The denial of reality seems a powerful draw at both political extremes. Fantastically conspiratorial obsessions with the Bush administration led to the diagnosis of “Bush Derangement Syndrome” and have stunted political debate on a variety of foreign policy issues among many liberals for over 8 years now. The “birther” obsessions with bizarre theories about the time and place of President Obama’s birth are now serving to hijack conservatives’ criticisms of Obama’s policy initiatives. Instead of focusing their fire on the profligate spending and political payoffs of initiatives from health care to labor relations, Republican representatives are forced to deal with hysterical nutcases waving their birth certificates in plastic baggies.
The resulting noise functions as political static, corrupting the clarity of an emerging conservative critique of the Obama administration and of an increasingly arrogant and extremist Congressional Democratic leadership with an incoherent babble of nonsense. The “Ron Paul effect” has morphed into the “birther” movement (there is extensive interminging between the two groups), bringing conspiracy theorists to fore and drowning out more serious analysis. And we all lose in the end when we are forced to deal with the substandard policies that get implemented during the distraction.
UPDATE: One of the factors feeding this ridiculous story is the far left, elements of which are putting together agent provocateur campaigns to try to feed the fiction that the entire Republican Party has been captured by this conspiracy scenario. The more that legitimate conservatives try to exterminate this conspiracy theory, the harder that some of the more dishonest elements of the far left will try to build it up. Yet when the parties in power and opposition are reversed, these are the same folks who lectured us endlessly about dishonesty and misrepresentation. Ha.
Also, Josh Marshall apparently thinks we’ve joined the ranks of “the Left” simply by virtue of our criticism of the birther whackiness. This revelation will come as a great surprise to the ranks of liberal bloggers and commenters that have grown to hate us. 
I suspect that many of the birthers are also truthers. Like that nutjob van Brunn, these folks are often not really in the same ballpark ideologically as conservatives and classical liberals, although some might think of themselves (in large part falsely) as libertarians. The paranoid types simultaneously place too little and way too much faith in government. On the latter score, they seem to think that folks who bring us FEMA can pull off paractically impossible conspiracies. The truth is both more mundane and more worrisome: we are moving in a statist direction in response to the everyday demands of large segments of citizens, organizations, etc.
After you peel away the crazies and the agent provocateurs, I suspect that birther Republicans would be a very small number. I will say, however, that it is unseemly that Obama’s entire history seems to be a closed book. Forget the (semi-private) birth certificate. What happened to the past record of his PUBLIC words and actions?