The Birthers Latest Idiocy

The Birthers are curious bunch of people. They started out as a group of butthurt Hilary Clinton supporters after the 2008 Democratic Primary and eventually morphed into a right-wing fringe group that gets promoted by the likes of World Net Daily and the Tea Party. Obama initially released the certificate on his campaign website in June 2008. This was a short-term birth certificate scanned the year before. For most smart and educated people, this is where that little rumor should have ended. Conservative columnist Jim Geraghty wrote of the certificate on National Review Online: "Barring some vast conspiracy within Hawaii State Department of Health, there is no reason to think his original birth certificate would have any different data." Even Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, then a right-wing blog, thought the birthers were idiots. Joseph Farah of WorldNetDaily, however, thought they were on to something. Birth-certificate conspiracy theories have been a staple of that site since then.

For several years after Obama won the 2008 election, the birthers themselves by demanding that Obama release his long-term "official birth certificate" alleging that he hadn't been born in the USA and was thus ineligible to be president. In 2009, Chuck Norris (yes, that Chuck Norris) wrote an open letter to Obama urging him to release the birth certificate. That same year, a layer named Orly Taitz (yes, really) tried to bring a lawsuit against the Obama Administration and used a fake Kenyan birth certificate that she forged herself as her "evidence." In 2011, Obama released his long-term birth certificate. The birthers, predictably, claimed it was "photoshopped." The arguments they used were convincing to talk radio hosts, people who regularly attend Tea Party meetings, and to the barely literate cretins that infest the internet. And Donald Trump.

The person who authorized the release of that certificate was Loretta Fuddy, the state Health Director of Hawaii. She died last Wednesday in a plane crash off the Hawaiian Island of Molokai. She was the sole fatality in a plane filled with nine people. This is apparently sufficient evidence for the birthers to believe that a conspiracy is involved. The tin foil hat crowd at Freedom Outpost believes in a conspiracy, as does this epically insane, completely uneducated, and senile old fuck. So does Donald Trump. And Erik Rush along with 9/11 truther Jim Garrow as well.

The evidence they have that Obama had Fuddy killed is that she was the only one on the plane to die. Solid evidence, right? Oh wait, not if there were only nine fucking people on the plane. And they have absolutely no other evidence to go by except this. Here's Donald Trump's tweet:

This is probably the only tweet about how "strange" it is that she was the only person to die out of only nine people in a plane crash that's properly spelled and punctuated. I could go and check but I don't want my brain to shut down from overexposure to raw stupidity. 

Philip Bump of The Atlantic explains just how stupid and improbably this theory is:

As for the birthers themselves, I have one response to them: