Just in time for April Fool's Day,Frontpage Magazine's Andrew Walden has a post up, beseeching at long last his fellow travelers to cease promulgating one of the more ornate and insane conspiracy theories about Barack Obama:
A fairly impressive internet industry has sprung up claiming that Obama was born in either Kenya or Indonesia. This is nonsense which distracts from the broadly unexplored story of Obama's upbringing. This kind of nonsense has emerged because the McCain campaign chose not to raise the many questions about Barack Obama's numerous hard-left alliances. Barack Obama was born in Hawai'i, August 4, 1961 at Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu.
What Walden is describing is the so-called "Birther" movement, of people who believe that Obama is not an American citizen. You see, by their thinking, a elaborate conspiracy and cover-up has been staged by Obama's parents, various foreigners, state and federal officials, and any number of bureaucrats to make it seem like Barack Obama is an American citizen when actually he is not.
Then, the members of this strange cabal, having pulled off their diabolical trick, sat back for a number of decades, in the hopes that Obama might one day run for president. It's the perfect crime, obviously. For an added challenge, they gave Obama the middle name "Hussein" - betting that decades later, the United States would install a dictator in Iraq by that name and then, even later, go to war with that guy, twice! I tell you, it's genius.
So it's nice to see someone, anyone, strongly inveighing against this nonsense. But if you look closely, what Walden is actually doing is substituting an utterly insane conspiracy theory with a thunderously obtuse one:
By refusing media requests for a look at the actual paper birth certificate, Obama's campaign gave sly backhanded assistance to the forgery hype. The internet release of the birth certificate via hyper-partisan website Daily Kos on June 12 before posting it on a campaign website was likely calculated to fuel the frenzy. This is Obama's Gramscian strategy designed to redirect the opposition down a blind alley. It was so successful that Hawai'i government offices found themselves inundated with telephone calls from mainland voters in the days before the November 4 election.
Ahh, you see! This whole annoying "Birther" phenomenon happened PRECISELY AT THE MOMENT OBAMA PLANNED IT, so he could...uhm...tie up some phones in Hawaii? Because Hawaiian government officials would have prevented a "Granscian strategy designed to redirect the opposition down a blind alley," where presumably all the "many questions about Barack Obama's numerous hard-left alliances," would have actually been raised.
Leaving aside the fact that all of those supposed alliances were raised, repeatedly, by the media, over and over and over and over again (to the point that the reason McCain didn't raise them again was simply because their campaign, so bent on winning the news cycle, wouldn't have derived any benefit from picking over old news), there was another way this cunning Obama stratagem could have been foiled: EVERYONE COULD HAVE BEEN PERFECTLY REASONABLE ABOUT OBAMA'S OBVIOUSLY LEGAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Walden concludes his piece by saying, "It is time for folks to stop being played by the Obama campaign and drop this counter productive 'phony birth certificate' nonsense." And next year at this time, he can call on people to drop this counter productive "Obama manipulated the phony birth certificate nonsense" nonsense.
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