AT LAST WE'RE MOVING ON TO ISSUES OF IMPORTANCE TO ALL AMERICANS. Ace O. Spades bellows that the Democrats were going to throw away some unused flags from Denver, which the Republicans claim to have obtained and say they'll use at a McCain rally -- after which, no doubt, a team of boy scouts will fold up each tiny flag and store it in a fallen Marine's footlocker. Spades assures his comrades, "Don't worry, this won't be one of those things only rightwing nut jobs know about," but you have to wonder: how will normal people respond to the news that the GOP has pulled flags from the trash to use as political props? Well, at least it's not as messy as when they were doing that with fetuses.

Meanwhile Obama's assurance that the Democrats "won't be bullied" by Republican attacks is portrayed as a sign of weakness by Tom McGuire. "What is Obama saying," writes Maguire, "he won't be bullied by a 44 year old hockey mom? Stand Tall, Barack -- you won't be bullied by Sarah Palin! " This seems a reductive reference to the woman Maguire and company consider the second coming of ReaganThatcher. But Obama could hardly have been talking about Palin, who since her comedy routine at the Convention has been kept under wraps, lest she be asked questions. Obama's probably talking about operatives like Maguire, who follows up with a Tourette's spasm of Republican punchlines:

OMG, is this a secret plan to assassinate Putin by making him laugh so hard he gets an aneurysm?... Man up, Barry - even though she was a state champ, you are probably a better baller, too, what with being 6' 2" and a guy to boot. 'Course there is that cigarette smoking that may have cut your wind... COURAGE! Get me Bert Lahr! Or Dan Rather... A certain type of lib likes to pretend that Obama showed courage by opposing the war in Iraq back in 2002...

This mashup of Rush Limbaugh campfire tropes is basically the Republican campaign, and if it seems less than intimidating on the page, imagine it broadcast at high volume by thousands of paid propagandists, and by an even larger number of volunteers like Maguire. It's not the quality of these ideas that Democrats need guts to stand up to, but their amplitude.

IT'S BIRTHERIFFIC! The tale of the soldier who refused to serve in Afghanistan on the grounds that Obama was born on foreign soil and is therefore not President -- an evasion of duty the soldier apparently had a right to pull as a reservist, which fact he initially concealed in order to drum up publicity for his cause -- has done us the favor of drawing out some heretofore unrevealed birther bloggers. I didn't know, for instance, that Tom Maguire of Just One Minute was one of them, but I may be forgiven for missing that as he's obviously trying to have it both ways:

AS TO THE BIRTHER CONSPIRACIES: I have no idea what the current state of play with the birther conspiracies might be (and I am not sure I want to find out), but the I will reiterate the one idea I might be able to pass off as original - Obama's mother and maternal grandparents would not have been cooking the paperwork on Obama's citizenship status in 1961 in order to preserve his Presidential viability in 2008; they would have been doing so in order to enhance their own chances in a custody scuffle with the Kenyan father...

Maguire's not like those nuts -- he's got an original conspiracy theory! And one with which he harasses poor, sane David Weigel at the Independent ("In his comments section Dave Weigel implicitly accedes to the notion that the Dunhams had a powerful motive to fudge Obama's citizenship... My follow-up comment is being blocked there, at least for now..."). This is a great way to show the world that you're not nuts, though maybe Maguire should march around outside Weigel's apartment with a sign that says "RELEASE THE MAGUIRE COMMENTS" to really cement the impression.

DirectorBlue has an even more wizardly fake-out: "Well, I'm certainly no conspiracy theorist when it comes to Barack Obama's birthplace, having done my best to help debunk the birth certificate controversy. But this article, from Ghana's leading newspaper, certainly won't help dull the outcry any."

Riddlemethis at The Astute Bloggers is more forthrightly in for the big win. Learning that the recalcitrant soldier had lost a Security Services gig with the DOD, Riddlemethis roars, "Is this what can expect from our DOD and the Obama administration: intimidation, termination, and bullying. Seems that Obama has a very large problem on his hands and has really got to show the birth certificate and everything sealed for that matter." Obama's really stepped in it this time! Riddlemethis will now watch developments with his nose that much closer to the screen, and a rag handy to wipe away the fog his breath leaves on this glass.

Not all of them are crazy in precisely this way. This Ain't Hell don't buy this birther crap nohow -- which is why he's mad that "the Obama Administration renews the paranoia from the birthers." Why would Obama sic the dogs of birtherism on himself? Maybe just to show off, like Houdini. When This Ain't Hell finds out that about the soldier's prevarications, he adds, "That still doesn’t let the Left off the hook, though." Jesus, everybody's in on this conspiracy to protect Obama by attacking him.

This story, today's insane jabber about Obama's pitch at the All-Star Game, and their other deranged obsessions further convince me that they're not even trying to argue against Obama to their fellow citizens anymore, but are just constructing an alternate reality in which to ride things out for a couple of terms.

AFTERBIRTHERISM.

"I guess the Obama administration felt they had milked all the political advantage they could out of refusing to release the birth certificate," huffs Rob Port of Say Anything. This familiar blaming-the-victimology is seen elsewhere -- including a post from, get this, Tom Maguire, for years king of the passive-aggressive crypto-birthers:

My Official Editorial Rumination was that there was no reason for the White House to hide it other than Obama's practice of managing his brand by hiding everything (leaving critics and skeptics unsure which haystack actually conceals a needle which may or may not exist.)

I'm sure Comrade Obama appreciates Maguire's cooperation in that strategy.

Others use the occasion to declare a big win for Donald Trump, whom the release leaves without his one reliable source of publicity, and obliged to explain to the plebes why a thrice-bankrupt blowhard should be their next President. Well, at least those investigators he sent to Hawaii got a nice paid vacation out of the deal. ("Hello, boss? We're hard on his trail! Soon as I finish this stinger -- er, report -- we're on our way to Bimini to explore the Adam Clayton Powell connection!")

But where there's dumb, there's hope! PunditPress:

Why they waited until now and why they released it to TwitPic is unknown at this time.

Update- The White House website also has this picture as the birth certificate, which for some reason, is a different color...

Cue the Colorists! Nah -- the next phase of Operation Confuse-a-Con will be led by Obama's Alinskyite soulmate, the trickster Bill Ayers.

UPDATE. PunditPress seems to have altered its post. Have to wait for the cache.

UPDATE 2. William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection takes a Questions-Remain approach:

Succumbing to the realization -- which I also predicted -- that the "Birther" strategy was failing, the White House has purported to release this morning a "long form" birth certificate.

Perhaps sensing that the purportance was not going his way, he amplifies:

Update: For some reason people have seized on the words "[i]t looks to me like a 1961 version of the short form" as a reflection of skepticism on my part. That was not my intent. I merely wanted to point out that the document doesn't look all that different than the document previously released, although it does have some additional information.

My comment at Politico's Arena:
The document goes a long way, if not completely, towards quieting the issue...

To the last ditch with Colonel Mustard! The night before he was telling people that birtherism was Good News for Republicans:

Obama may be winning in some circles, but the polling indicates that increasing percentages of Americans -- including substantial percentages of independents -- do not believe Obama was born in the U.S. or are unsure. I'll have more on the polling tomorrow, but you never hear about the numbers for independents, you only hear about the numbers for Republicans.

Hint, go out to dinner with four independent voters; then try to guess which one of them thinks Obama was born elsewhere. Because if the polls are accurate, one of them does.

Easy. He's the one with the bib.

UPDATE 3. In comments, Cargo: "The conspiracies will continue as long as the President remains black."

Thanks also to mark f for alerting me to Jonah Goldberg's related mouthfart:

Distractions, Silliness Are Our Enemy

So proclaimed Obama in his “I am a grown-up” press conference just now. He railed against “distractions” and “silliness” that prevent us from grappling with our very serious problems. Then, he left to go tape the Oprah Winfrey show and hold a fundraiser. No word on when his next tee time will be.

I can't fault his reasoning here, because he doesn't supply any; it's just a bizarre tantrum. (I was going to call it an embarrassment, but Goldberg has never shown any capacity for that emotion.) And he keeps the tone up in his own comments section:

Stan - Troll much? I've never endorsed birtherism, I've been blistering in my criticism of Trump, and all you're doing here is tu quoque b.s. By the way I'd rather be a member of a party that flirts with birtherism than trutherism.

Which Democratic Presidential front-runner endorsed trutherism, again? Somebody throw Goldberg the rubber doll to wrestle till he calms down.

AMERICA'S LOVE OF CHOCOLATE ICE CREAM DOOMS DEMOCRAT. Tom Maguire follows the hostage drama at a Clinton campaign office:

Setting aside the human toll, my instant guess is that the political impact of this will be bad for Hillary in a way that would not be true for another candidate. This may all change when we get the perpetrator's story but right now Ms. Clinton carries the heavy baggage of a huge favorable rating and this incident will remind people that she is the candidate that enrages a sizable slice of the public.

More pathetic and politically inert details come in. Maguire's take:

It's bad for Hillary.

Interesting colloquy in the comments:

It's bad for Hillary.

I'm not sure I agree with this. I don't think it matters one bit. It looks as if this is just a poor soul and has no effect on Hillary. At least it doesn't change my view of Hillary either way.

I guess I just don't see it.
...

You don't see because you don't want to see.

Hillary is bad and therefore everything that involves -- or doesn't involve -- Hillary is bad. Bad for Hillary.

Hillary drove that man to drink and caused his life to become meaningless.

Tom understands.

I'm glad someone else has a sense of humor about this; I was beginning to think the world had gone mad, again.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about rightbloggers starting, with an auspicious and a dropping eye, to adjust to life after the carnival and Make Mine Mitt. It's starting to look like 2008 again, when the party bosses foisted that traitor John McCain on them. Well, they still get to run against a black guy.

Excised from the final draft was Tom Maguire, who didn't enjoy Ron Paul's attack on Newt Gingrich for his lack of military service as much as I did.  Maguire pointed out that when Paul served he had not been stationed in a hot zone, and therefore was "not likely to be shot at," whereas when Gingrich had a chance to serve in Vietnam "in 1965, it was not yet clear to the public at large that the Johnson Administration had no strategy for winning the war." As Gingrich is an esteemed historian, he presumably foresaw both America's defeat and his own importance to the nation's future, and wisely kept himself safe home. What a patriot!

Oh, and there's that asshole Rod Dreher, who claims to both believe and endorse Rick Santorum's claim that if his own son came out gay he would not beat him with a tire iron until he straightened out:

I found out that in my small, very conservative and churchgoing Southern town, there’s a lot of affection for Ginger Snap, a local black drag queen. Ginger Snap has her own float in the community Christmas parade. I guarantee that if you polled the people along the parade route, both white and black, nine out of 10 would say that homosexuality is wrong and that same-sex marriage shouldn’t be allowed. But they will also watch Ginger Snap roll by on her float and wave.

No civil rights for you, but we shore enjoy you wearin' a purty dress on a parade float! I wonder how many of them hit on Ginger Snap when they're drunk.

TORTURE MEMO. The Obama speech expectedly offered to split the baby, with a reaffirmation of closing Gitmo and abjuring torture on one hand, and an acceptance of what amount to indefinite detentions on the other. The objections of Glenn Greenwald and Digby are well-taken. Like I said, I'm not fool enough to expect any American president in our national-security age to do the wholly right thing. The speech's primary usefulness was political, that is, deflecting the nutty pseudo-concerns of his opponents over the closing of Guantanamo and his Administration's generally not-as-bad detainee policies. He's very good at that, and it's too bad that he didn't try to do the same with the policies he has not, to his discredit, reversed.

Cheney's speech also was as expected, mainly beating his chest over the Bush security record and snarling at his opposition. I can hardly be shocked at his rhetorical excesses -- e.g., attributing to Obama a "we brought it on ourselves" attitude toward 9/11 -- because I never expected him to play good citizen once somebody else was in power; he has never acknowledged any authority other than his own, and thus talks, now that he is out of office, as if he were running a government in exile.

I did expect the usual suspects to react in the usual way, and they don't disappoint. Here's a lovely passage from Reliapundit:

Lincoln and Sherman and grant defeated the South and slavery by GOING ALL OUT. Ditto FDR and Truman in WW2. As Truman said -- If you can't stand the heat, then get out of the kitchen. And THE BUCK STOPS HERE.

Also, Tippecanoe and Tyler Too. He says Obama isn't "man enough" to approve torture. For Reliapundit the War on Whatchamacallit is like all other wars, but with no satisfying public explosions, so he must imagine brave deeds performed in hidden dungeons to achieve the proper ecstasies.

This misbegotten butchitude spills over to Tom Maguire, who talks about "The Small Boys, Joe and Ezra Klein," who "will swoon, elevate, transport, or whatever they always do after an Obama speech," though "Sully and Greenwald," being a different species of homosexual, "will fume." Cheney, on the other hand, "pounds the table," which is real manliness, done by two-fisted executives in old movies and toddlers displeased with their supper.

Don Surber is provoked to "giggle" when the President mentions the Constitution and what it requires: "what did any of this have to do with national security?" This encapsulates their general attitude. They're holding imaginary thumbscrews and cats-o-nine-tails and wearing red, white and blue hoods, and their vicarious thrills have been frustrated by some wimp who talks about the Constitution. No wonder they're hailing Cheney as the second coming of Rush Limbaugh. After months of stumbling in the wilderness, he's finally given them a cause they can not only believe in, but also feel in their loins.

WORST AMONG EQUALS. That Koran-burning guy seems to be pissing everybody off. Sane people of course have always found such provocations absurd. (If you are the sort to bring up Piss Christ as if it relates, I can only say that explaining the difference between art and propaganda is something your high-school English teachers should have done for you, but if you'll send me $200 I'll send you a study guide.)

But as you may have heard, even the rightwing nuts are not completely on board with it. Even the Sarah Palin Word Factory squeezed out some toleration talk for the occasion -- then, perhaps noticing that a lot of the commenters were mad because the SPWF was being nice to Mooslims, added this:

Update: Book burning is bad. But the Muslim cleric who is running for parliament in Afghanistan is calling for the murder of American children in response to scorched Korans, which is worse. Where is the media's focus?

The many fans of the Sarah Palin Word Factory can be distracted from anything -- Mooslim-hate, sexual climax, even the latest episode of "Wipeout" -- by the red flag that is the Lame Stream Media.

Most other conservative vendors are just as transparently insincere in their denunciation of Pastor Jones' stunt. Allahpundit is so confused by his own twisting logic trail that among the evil media he claims are trying to "buttress their pre-midterm 'Islamophobia' narrative" with the burning he includes... Fox News.

Many of these folks denounce the coverage itself as some sort of liberal plot -- never mind that it does the liberal cause no good; that just means it's a plot that didn't work! "Some crackpot dreamed up a stunt that the liberal media loved, and now they don't know how to get off the tiger," says Tom Maguire. NewsBusters even asked, "Did Media Negligently Create Koran Burning Controversy?" and wondered why said media would follow such a transparent put-up job, an "unknown Pastor - with a following smaller than what's normally in line at an In-n-Out restaurant drive-thru..."

To which I can only: I dunno. Why did the media follow the every garbled word of a highly unsuccessful Vice-Presidential candidate and resigned Governor who, were she not so heavily promoted by them, would have been laughed off the public stage, and help build her into the head of Goober Nation? (Especially considering that an actual former VPOTUS, who served both of his terms without resigning and then won most of the votes in a Presidential election, was treated by the same media as a buffoon?) Why did the media treat a handful of bumper stickers and T-shirt logos, and one billboard, as a groundswell of support for former President Bush, and an even smaller number of actual "Obama Joker" signs as evidence of an populist uprising? Why does the media promote rightwing non-entities with no record of accomplishment, and rightwing bloggers of no discernible talents, in the New York Times?

So how would the media know not to pay attention to the Koran-burning clown? He's every bit as deserving of the public's attention as most of our bigtime conservatives.

THE NEVER-ENDING STORY. It was strategically necessary for National Review to abjure the birthers. They have been giving their movement and the party to which it is attached some bad publicity, which Democrats had been exploiting. In its current, fragmented state, the conservative movement cannot be said to have leadership, but National Review at least has a historical place in it. Though Rush Limbaugh plays with birtherism and Lou Dobbs stumps for it, the magazine's demurrer allows critics like Alex Koppelman to say that "the right bails on Birthers."

You'd like to think so. But these ideas, if we can so dignify them, don't die, but merely hibernate. They were declaring FDR a socialist in the 1930s; after a blessedly long interval, during which this was only whispered in their salons, they have taken to declaring FDR a socialist again. As someone once said, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

You can see it burrowing even in the hour of birtherism's alleged defeat. National Review takes care to mention that, as far as they know, the birth certificate story "originated with a Hillary Clinton supporter." It's one of the many knocks on Democrats the authors use to help their readers take the pill, but it's also something they can come back to when they're reassessing the evidence. After all, it didn't come from their labs, so there might be something in it they've missed; and didn't Henry Waxman tip his hand once in an unguarded moment? There are no coincidences, people.

Their movement colleagues are less clever. Macsmind suggests that Clinton may be behind the present birther movement and "may very well be working somehow behind the scenes to sink Obama’s plans." He also mocks the validation of "Hawaii’s Health Director, and Barack Obama supporter" who "has 'certified' his birth certificate. 'It’s there I saw it!' Guess that settles that." Eventually he says, "who cares," which preserves his plausible deniability, and when it all comes back he can show off the quotes around "certified" as proof that he was never really taken in.

There remain plenty of folks out there -- including the esteemed Tom Maguire -- who have no need for such games, and will keep hope alive. They may not enjoy a full birther Restoration, but this will stay in their bag of dirt -- along with Kathleen Willey's cat, the Whitey tapes, and other such detritus -- to be sprinkled at the margins when the next big push comes around. Count on WHERE'S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE signs at the 2012 Republican Convention, at Palin revival meetings, at Tea Parties, and everywhere else the boobs may take the bait.

YOUR OWN LYIN' EYES. The meaning of the much-circulated Photoshop of Barack Obama as a shoeshine boy shining Sarah Palin's pumps is clearly understood by most people. We're sure the boys at Chimpout -- "Cops on Nigger Obama and shoeshine boy Gates" -- and Stormfront get the joke. See also Urban Dictionary, etc.

The image has turned up at Free Republic, SodaHead, and other places where you'd expect to see it. But other rightbloggers are going to great lengths to rehabilitate this ancient racist trope since it's been used on Obama.

One device they're using is the Democratic Party affiliation of one person whose handling of the photo made the news. "Her status as a registered Democrat cannot be ignored," says Patterico.

As the image was flagged by Charles Johnson, whose apostasy has made him a target of conservatives, this becomes a "My Hair is a Bird, Your Argument Is Invalid" line of defense among the brethen. "For someone so 'scientific' [as Johnson],'" says American Power, "real facts must have caused nasty bouts of cognitive dissonance and psychological displacement." Patterico's research is commended by America Daughter Media Center: "If a CJ makes a mistake, along comes a Patterico to correct it... bloggers are inheriting the mantle of the dying mainstream media."

Others are actually insisting that there's nothing racist about it. Tom Maguire, while conceding that "there are certainly some racial overtones of servitude to the shoe shine imagery," learns that Rush Limbaugh claims to have once been a shoeshine boy, thus cleansing the image of its racial associations.

Instapundit picks it up:

Or is it racist? Rush Limbaugh actually was a shoeshine boy. Yeah the racial stereotype is a bit shaky -- when I was a kid I knew older brothers of friends who did that; even in Birmingham, Alabama they were white. By the time I was a teenager, of course, shoeshines were on the way out.

And he's from Tennessee, so he should know. We also have Armed Liberal taking the things-are-complicated approach, whereby liberals of the unarmed kind are trying to make a "Big Story" out of what is actually the fascinatingly complex phenomenon of a black President pictured shining shoes. Plus he saw a black cashier being mean to an Asian.

Another Black Conservative testifies to the work ethic of black shoeshine men, which he suggests may be the real meaning of the photo. Certainly it's less demeaning than the job ABC's got.

Soon they'll be telling us that pictures of watermelons on the White House lawn are a tribute to Michelle Obama's garden, pictures of Obama as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose are a tribute to his rich cultural heritage, etc.

SHORTER TOM MAGUIRE: Michael Moore Al Gore is Fat.

I understand nearly 40 million people in the U.S. watched the Oscars last night. And from what I see on the blogs, 20 million of them were right-wing dorks looking for something to bitch about.

My favorite of these so far is an anonymous "actress and mother" who rages against Little Miss Sunshine because it reflects "modern Hollywood’s glorification of the miserable":

If you are miserable, then Little Miss Sunshine is the film for you. You can wallow in your misery, while enjoying the misery of others. But if you are a happy soul, resist the hype. The chances are good you will leave this film feeling worse than ever before. Then, perhaps, you will be more apt to join them in their quest to tear down everything that is good and decent, and create a damaged society in your own image.

It's too bad this review came out too late for the producers of Little Miss Sunshine to mine it for pull-quotes.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, in which I attend the follow-through on the story of Obama's disastrous Nobel Prize victory. Apparently the new angle is that the Committee contrived by means of the award to get Obama to abandon Afghanistan, hand the U.S. over to global-warming internationalists, and Lord knows what else. Thus, if henceforth Obama does anything the Right doesn't like, it will be in appeasement of our Oslo overlords. Soon the Scandinavians will replace France, Russia, etc. as right-wing hate-objects, and Jonah Goldberg will be writing about lutefisk-eating surrender nudists.

Tom Maguire stocks up for future outrage should Obama treasonously pick up his Prize: "Should Obama be taking time out of his schedule to deliver a pretty speech just because some Norwegians want a semi-private showing?" Well, the bastard did have the temerity to show up for his own Inauguration, when he could have been yelling at black kids who were wearing their pants too low.

I see Matt Welch is back in the saddle, raging against the Nobel in the New York Post: "Even Kofi Annan's 2001 award could be seen as a thumb in the eye of a Republican foreign policy that has used the United Nations as a pinata." In the reign of President Palin, he can always say he's sorry again.

MORAL RELATIVISTS. You want to know how they do it? Here's a good example. A Wall Street Journal writer looks at some confusion over CDC figures concerning obesity and mortality. His conclusion: no one really knows if being fat is bad for you. In fact, no one really knows much of anything -- not when it comes to the dark arts of medicine and climatology:

This is confusing--and that's the point. Science, of its nature, is always confusing. Medicine is uncertain. But public-policy formation in the U.S., especially as concerns health policy or the environment, whether obesity or the melting of the polar ice caps, admits to very little confusion. We claim to know. But in fact we usually don't know.

Contrast the approach of this WSJ guy, Daniel Henninger, with a different sort of assessment of the same basic data: Thomas Maguire takes the few extra steps needed to reveal that the statistical blips do not prove that packing on the pounds is a risk-free activity. The rest of us may come to similar conclusions using what our ancestors called common sense, paired with our powers of observation.

But for conservative functionaries such as Henninger, doing his bit to further the antiEnlightenment, the grey areas of scientific enquiry are proof that science is, after all, just guesswork, no more valid than your guesses or mine if it comes to that, so that the science community's consensus on, say, global warming can be easily ignored if your spritual or political leaders require it of you.

This attitude has long been in effect further down the food chain, of course -- as in this Washington Times laugher, in which evolution is referred to by its old name of Darwinism -- not an institution, after all, but just the ditherings of one guy who was not Jesus! If some folk prefer to "use a little imagination" on behalf of Intelligent Design, who are the labcoats to squawk? But now that the prestigious Journal has taken it up, we may note a change in the weather, so to speak. You're either with them or against them, as always, whether they're right or wrong -- but now, even if you know what you're talking about and they don't have the slightest fucking clue, "against them" is still the wrong place to be -- maybe even more wrong than ever.