TWO, THREE, MANY BIRTHERISMS

Betty Cracker takes note of Matt Drudge's scare headline ROMNEY WARNS: OBAMA COMING FOR GUNS. Betty writes:

Here's the story it links to, which covers Mittens' NRA speech. In that speech, Mittens regurgitated the NRA's own paranoid fantasy about Obama, which goes something like this: Obama does fuck-all about guns for four years as part of a fiendishly clever scheme to lull gun owners into a false sense of security and win a second term. And then, just as quick as his hand leaves the bible on his Second Inauguration Day, Obama orders jack-booted ATF agents to go door-to-door to forcibly disarm the populace.

I'm sure I've said this a thousand times, but the unreported story of our times is that birtherism isn't an isolated example of paranoid lunacy taking hold of a disturbingly large segment of the population -- in fact, modern conservatism is driven by multiple lunatic theories that are precisely as delusional as birtherism. In this case, except in a few deep-blue states and cities, both major parties have simply handed over control of policy on a major issue to an organization that believes utterly paranoid things. We let the paranoids have all the power on this issue even though people die as a result. It's as if we turned control of NASA over to people who think the moon landing was faked, or science education over to people who don't believe in evolution. Oh, wait, we also do that last one in a lot of locales, don't we?