Isn’t Life Strange?

For the past eight years I’ve been visiting one particular website for a good variety of political news and commentary. It’s a Conservative political discussion forum and the users there post news articles, or links to news stories, and engage in sometimes interesting discussions over the topics of the day. Because these stories are linked to sources throughout the world, it makes it easy to learn about news stories I would otherwise miss.

I won’t link to or mention the name of that particular website, partially because I am trying to break my addiction to the site, and mostly because I don’t want to be associated with a certain percentage of the obsessive whackjobs over there. Recent developments have given me no other option but to conclude that many of the people who regularly post there are just as loony as those they ridicule on the left - not that the loons on the left don’t deserve the ridicule. I’m just now starting to realize that maybe the left doesn’t hold an exclusive right to conspiracy theory nutjobbery and stupidity in action from behind the keyboard.

The development I mentioned above centers around the insane question regarding President Obama’s birth certificate. Indeed there have been questions in the past about whether Obama was actually born in the United States, and if he has actually produced the documentation to prove so. When this story broke during the campaign, and a “Certificate of Live Birth” was distributed throughout the Internet, I was interested enough to consider the notion that there may have been something odd about it.

But here we are, six months into the Obama presidency, and people simply won’t shut up about it.

Wading through the discussion threads over there is becoming an exercise like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. People have posted article after article of birther nonsense, taken from questionable sources and every nutjob blog on the Internet. No one can produce one shred of evidence that Obama was born anywhere but in Hawaii, and there is absolutely nothing that can convince them that circumstantial evidence will not and can not change that fact.

The trouble with conspiracy theorists is that they don’t realize the simple act of saying something doesn’t make it true. Saying the same lie a hundred times doesn’t make it a fact. Getting loud and angry without having proof to support your claim only makes you look sad and unstable.