REPURPOSING THE CRAZY

Via Politico's Ben Smith, I see that Esquire has published a story about a recent visit by uber-birther Orly Taitz to Kentucky, where she was greeted like a rock star at a gun shoot, then met the next day with some folks (including a militia leader) hoping to convene a "common-law jury to try and indict the usurper, Barry Soetoro aka Barack Hussein Obama," then attempted to browbeat officials at various levels of the government in an effort to have Obama's election declared invalid.

In other words, just another day at the office for Taitz.

But I see that she has a few more theories than I was aware of (and not just the theory that Obama has used dozens of Social Security numbers):

Goldman Sachs runs the treasury.

Obama is a puppet.

There's a cemetery somewhere in Arizona where they just dug 30,000 fresh graves, which wait now for the revolution.

Baxter International -- a major Obama contributor -- developed a vaccine for bird flu that actually kills people.

Google Congressman Alcee Hastings and House Bill 684 and you'll see that they're planning at least six civilian labor camps.

Google an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about train cars with shackles.

The communist dictator Hugo Chavez way back in 2004 purchased the Sequoia software that runs our voting machines and the mainstream media won't report any of it -- not even Fox because Saudi Arabia bought a percentage of Fox in 2007.

My first thought is: Why was David Schuster so hostile to Taitz when she was on MSNBC? It would have been much more fun if he'd lent a sympathetic ear and just let her go full-tilt looney with all of these pet theories, and, who knows, probably more besides. (I'm really fascinated by all of this, Orly. Anything else?)

And where does she get this stuff? I decided to try to track down the train-cars-with-shackles story and learned that it's been kicking around since the Bush years. Taitz is repurposing it to bash Obama.

She's actually right about the San Francisco Chronicle article -- it's here, and it says in part:

The government has ... contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees.

It appeared in 2008; the authors are Lewis Seiler and Dan Hamburg. Hamburg is a ponytailed former Democratic congressman who's also been affiliated with the Greens in recent years (he backed Nader in 2000). Seiler and Hamburg go on to talk about "a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of 'all removable aliens' and 'potential terrorists,'" citing conspiratorialist Peter Dale Scott (who links ENDGAME to Halliburton).

Seiler and Hamburg don't say the railcars with shackles are a Halliburton product, but you don't have to Google for very long to find them ascribed to Halliburton -- here, for instance. Elsewhere, the manufacturer is said to be a company called Gunderson. Or perhaps Gunderson is only one of the manufacturers, as Seiler and Hamburg argued -- that's what we learn from this 2004 Rense.com article, written by someone whose synapses are firing rather wildly:

Speaking on anonymity, an employee of a manufacturer of railcars stated that Gunderson Rail Car Co. received a contract to build over 400 boxcars. These boxcars were ordered and paid for by the UN. They were white and they had shackles built into them. Shackles possibly for a brother, a sister, a mother, or you. Another company was making the boxcars as well. A company called Thrall Railcar.

Thrall Rail Car merged with Trinity Industries, Inc. in October of 2001 to form the Trinity Rail Group. For those of you who believe in David Icke's views on occult symbolism in corporate logos, I'll simply add that Trinity Industries has "3 pyramids" in their logo.

This person also tells us these are UN/FEMA railcars. Didn't know they worked together, did you?

This stuff gets specific. FEMA ordered 102,000 boxcars with shackles! No, 107,000! Whoops, sorry -- 107,200!

More recently, a poster to the message boards of Military.com declared that some of the railcars with shackles also have guillotines. There are also theories floating around concerning concentration camps, plastic coffins, and plans to kill 90% of the American people.

Yeah, an awful lot of this is left-leaning -- or was until ... oh, er, this past January. But, see, I've been a lefty blogger for nearly seven years, and a politically aware lefty for longer than that, and this is the first I've heard of any of this. This stuff is way, way off the average lefty's radar.

But Taitz takes her conspiratorialist bent in a rightward direction and -- voila! -- she's a hero. She may not be getting traction for the rest of this stuff, but she certainly got traction for the birther nonsense.

I ban 9/11 truthers from my comments. Trutherism has been rebuffed by virtually every left-leaning member of Congress, pundit, or serious blogger.

But nuttiness has finally found a home -- on the right.