(Stewart's bit from Tuesday night makes the point that Krugman makes earlier)

Do you remember when Ann Coulter was relevant on Fox News? Yea, it's been a long while, but there was a time when she incensed liberals wither her off the wall rhetoric that was factually inaccurate and cravenly disgusting. It was her shtick though and she sold a lot of books because of it and even showed up on The Today Show doing political analysis of Bush. Unfortunately for the country, her kind of crazy, the kind that attacked the 9/11 widows back in 2006 bled into the GOP and now they are chock full of insane tea party House members and Senators, who say things that are so repugnant that they make her look very tepid in contrast. OK, she wasn't tepid, but she knew she wasn't running for office or heaven's forbid, the White House so she had a lot of leeway in that regard to vomit out anything that would annoy us . Many Progressive bloggers have been writing that the GOP are not recognizable Republicans from a couple of decade ago in any shape or form. They more resemble the rodeo clowns that inhabit hate talk AM radio rather than our elected officials. I bet their political staffers have office pools to see who says the most insane thing of the day.

Paul Krugman notices too.

Say AnythingOver the last couple of days, I’ve been getting mail accusing me of consorting with Nazis. My immediate reaction was, what the heck? Then it clicked: the right wing is mounting a full-court press to portray Occupy Wall Street as an anti-Semitic movement, based, as far as I can tell, on one guy with a sign.--The key to understanding this, I’d suggest, is that movement conservatism has become a closed, inward-looking universe in which you get points not by sounding reasonable to uncommitted outsiders — although there are a few designated pundits who play that role professionally — but by outdoing your fellow movement members in zeal.

It’s sort of reminiscent of Stalinists going after Trotskyites in the old days: the Trotskyites were left deviationists, and also saboteurs working for the Nazis. Didn’t propagandists feel silly saying all that? Not at all: in their universe, extremism in defense of the larger truth was no vice, and you literally couldn’t go too far.

Many members of the commenteriati don’t want to face up to the fact that this is what American politics has become; they cling to the notion that there are gentlemanly elder statesmen on the right who would come to the fore if only Obama said the right words. But the fact is that nobody on that side of the political spectrum wants to or can make deals with the Islamic atheist anti-military warmonger in the White House.

I imagine Paul Krugman got some inspiration to write this after Rick Perry went full on Birther the other day on CNBC. No matter how many GOP Governors criticize Perry for his words...

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What is it about Donald Trump and the GOP field? Trump is a joke, he's been a joke, and he will continue to be a joke. So is he acting as proxy for his rich buddies who will be bankrolling the 2012 election, or is it something else? First we had Herman Cain meeting with him, then Michele Bachmann sidling up next to him for a cozy radio town hall, and now we have Rick Perry going all-out birther.

Via ThinkProgress:

That wasn’t enough, however, to convince Rick Perry. In an interview with PARADE Magazine, Perry said that he recently met with Donald Trump and discussed the issue. Perry stated that he doesn’t “have a definitive answer” on whether Obama was born in the United States or “any idea” if Obama’s birth certificate is real.

Here’s the transcript:

Governor, do you believe that President Barack Obama was born in the United States?
I have no reason to think otherwise.That’s not a definitive, “Yes, I believe he”—
Well, I don’t have a definitive answer, because he’s never seen my birth certificate.But you’ve seen his.
I don’t know. Have I?You don’t believe what’s been released?
I don’t know. I had dinner with Donald Trump the other night.And?
That came up.And he said?
He doesn’t think it’s real.And you said?
I don’t have any idea. It doesn’t matter. He’s the President of the United States. He’s elected. It’s a distractive issue.

As Perry sinks in the polls, his strategy gets more and more desperate. After all, birthers represent the fringiest of the fringe of the lunatic GOP, yet here's Perry out pandering to them with the standard non-answer answer. And not only that, but doing it after his little dining experience with Donald Trump!

Orly Taitz' DNA has a big helping of loon in it, so the more Perry leans into her, the less chance he has of being the GOP nominee. And that, I guess, is a good thing.

Perhaps a better question to ask might be why interviewers insist on asking this question. It's ridiculous for Perry to have answered the way he did, but it's even more ridiculous for any interviewer to still give weight to the issue by asking him in the first place.

Liberal media? Yeah, right.

The Washington Post exposes Marco Rubio's faulty family story: Marco Rubio’s compelling family story embellishes facts, documents show

During his rise to political prominence, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) frequently repeated a compelling version of his family’s history that had special resonance in South Florida. He was the son of exiles, he told audiences, Cuban Americans forced off their beloved island after “a thug,” Fidel Castro, took power.

But a review of documents — including naturalization papers and other official records — reveals that Rubio’s dramatic account of his family saga embellishes the facts. The documents show that Rubio’s parents came to the United States and were admitted for permanent residence more than 21 / 2 years before Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban government and took power on New Year’s Day 1959.

It looks like Rubio embellished his family's plight for political gain.

In 2006, on the eve of his ascendancy to speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, Rubio told an audience that “in January of 1959 a thug named Fidel Castro took power in Cuba and countless Cubans were forced to flee and come here, many – most – here to America. When they arrived they were welcomed by the most compassionate people on all the Earth.”

Wearing a red flower in his lapel, his voice sometimes emotional, he praised those who fled, calling them “a great generation.” But he also assured them: “Today your children and grandchildren are the secretary of commerce of the United States and multiple members of Congress, they are the CEO of Fortune 500 companies and successful entrepreneurs, they are Grammy winning artists and they are renowned journalists, they are a United States senator and soon, even speaker of the Florida House.” The speech drew heavy coverage in Florida, for it was a momentous event. Rubio was the first Cuban American to become speaker of the House in the Florida Legislature...read on

And now it looks like Orly Taitz' group of fanatics are doing us some good for a change.

Miami Herald:

Unable to prevent Barack Obama from becoming president, rigid followers of the Constitution have turned their attention to another young, charismatic politician many think could one day occupy the White House. The birthers are focusing on U.S. Sen Marco Rubio, the budding Republican star from Florida.
“It’s nothing to do with him personally. But you can’t change the rules because you like a certain person. Then you have no rules,” said New Jersey lawyer Mario Apuzzo. Forget about the alleged Photoshopped birth certificates; the activists are not challenging whether Rubio was born in Miami. Rather, they say Rubio is ineligible under Article 2 of the Constitution which says “no person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

The rub is that “natural born citizen” was never defined. The birthers rely on writings at the time of the formation of the republic and references in court cases since then to contend that “natural born” means a person born to U.S. citizens. Rubio was born in 1971 at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, his office said, but his parents did not become citizens until 1975. “Marco Rubio was born a Cuban citizen via his parents,” screams a headline on a blog by birther Charles Kerchner, who obtained copies of the naturalization petitions by Rubio’s parents in May, igniting talk that is spreading across the Web.

I can't lie and say that I'm not enjoying this, but isn't he covered under the 14th amendment? At least these people are staying consistent with their weirdness. Rubio, who said that Social Security/Medicare Make Us Lazy has been a tea party hero.

Rush Limbaugh anointed Rubio as the next big deal in the GOP so I wonder if he'll step in and target one of his big constituencies, the Birthers. Who knew that WND would serve a useful purpose after all.

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I tell you, Klassy with a "K", these GOPers:

Barack Obama impersonator Reggie Brown was a surprise guest at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans.

Brown took the stage to laughter a few shouts of "Where's your birth certificate?"

Hoo! That's a knee-slapper there! Hey, remember when liberals couldn't criticize the president in a time of war because that made meant the terrorists won?

But then it got better when Brown devolved into racist jokes...no, seriously.

Prior to a speech by RNC Chair Reince Preibus, an Obama impersonator took the stage and told a series of racist jokes. A summary from Arron Blake:

• On Black History Month: “Michelle celebrates the full month. I celebrate half.”

• “My mother loved a black man,” but “she was not a Kardashian.”

• A picture was shown of Obama and the first lady when he took office. The impersonator then showed a picture of what the Obamas will look like when the president leaves office, and it was the characters of Fred Sanford and his sister-in-law, Ethel, from the show “Sanford and Son.”Doug Heye, the RNC’s communication director in 2010 tweeted: “Wonder why many minorities have problems with GOP? Hiring Obama impersonator to tell ‘black jokes’ at SRLC, for starters.”

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Earlier this week, while Ann Coulter was castigating any conservative who played along with Donald Trump's Birtherism, Sean Hannity whimperingly eagerly agreed (while kowtowing to Coulter) that he would raise with Donald Trump all sorts of the thorny facts that Coulter pointed out in her anti-Birther rant. (You may recall that she blamed the spread of the Trump/Birther story on the "liberal media".)

So of course, when Hannity finally did get around to raising the Birther issue with Trump in his two-part interview, he raised none of those issues and defended not a single fact.

Indeed, it was just a classic Hannity Job. Trump had nothing new to claim -- he just keeps regurgitating the same thoroughly debunked talking points on his theories. And Hannity just let him, of course -- with a little encouragement along the way.

So, in the same spirit, we'll just recap the debunking, as well as the salient points that Donald Trump's Birtherite candidacy raises:

-- Every point or claim that Trump raises is an outright falsehood or an incredibly obtuse distortion that only reveals how stupid and gullible he actually is.

-- In an ordinary universe where up is up and down is down, this would mean Trump would be making the rest of the GOP field look sane and intelligent by contrast.

-- Instead, he is now leading the GOP polls -- which not only must really suck for the usual Republican suspects, but also vividly illustrates the stupidity and gullibility of Republican primary voters.

-- He is quickly becoming the embodiment of Tea Party values: vapidity, irrationality, and arrogantly stupid.

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See, this is why they say that satire is dead. In a sane and normal world, this would be a real news story, and not a satire:

In a stunning development one day after the release of Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President, by Dr. Jerome Corsi, World Net Daily Editor and Chief Executive Officer Joseph Farah has announced plans to recall and pulp the entire 200,000 first printing run of the book, as well as announcing an offer to refund the purchase price to anyone who has already bought either a hard copy or electronic download of the book.

In an exclusive interview, a reflective Farah, who wrote the book's foreword and also published Corsi's earlier best-selling work, Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak out Against John Kerry and Capricorn One: NASA, JFK, and the Great "Moon Landing" Cover-Up, said that after much serious reflection, he could not go forward with the project. "I believe with all my heart that Barack Obama is destroying this country, and I will continue to stand against his administration at every turn, but in light of recent events, this book has become problematic, and contains what I now believe to be factual inaccuracies," he said this morning. "I cannot in good conscience publish it and expect anyone to believe it."

When asked if he had any plans to publish a corrected version of the book, he said cryptically, "There is no book." Farah declined to comment on his discussions of the matter with Corsi.

A source at WND, who requested that his name be withheld, said that Farah was "rip-shit" when, on April 27, President Obama took the extraordinary step of personally releasing his "long-form" birth certificate, thus resolving the matter of Obama's legitimacy for "anybody with a brain."

"He called up Corsi and really tore him a new one," says the source. "I mean, we'll do anything to hurt Obama, and erase his memory, but we don't want to look like fucking idiots, you know? Look, at the end of the day, bullshit is bullshit."

But of course, it is a satire:

UPDATE, 12:25 p.m., for those who didn't figure it out yet, and the many on Twitter for whom it took a while: We committed satire this morning to point out the problems with selling and marketing a book that has had its core premise and reason to exist gutted by the news cycle, several weeks in advance of publication. Are its author and publisher chastened? Well, no. They double down, and accuse the President of the United States of perpetrating a fraud on the world by having released a forged birth certificate. Not because this claim is in any way based on reality, but to hold their terribly gullible audience captive to their lies, and to sell books. This is despicable, and deserves only ridicule. That's why we committed satire in the matter of the Corsi book. Hell, even the president has a sense of humor about it all. Some more serious reporting from us on this whole "birther" phenomenon here, here, and here.

Apparently, Farah is taking it about as well as you'd expect a paranoid right-wing crank to: He's threatening to sue:

Joseph Farah, editor and chief executive officer of World Net Daily Books, which published Corsi’s work, said he never spoke to the magazine and that the book is “selling briskly.”

“I have never spoken to anyone from Esquire. Never uttered these words or anything remotely resembling them to anyone. It is a complete fabrication,” Farah told The Daily Caller. “The book is selling briskly. I am 100 percent behind it.”
...

Farah said he is considering “legal options” against the magazine for posting the story .

“Let me say this very clearly: There is not a single word of that report that is true. I assume it is a very poorly executed parody. In any case, I have begun exploring our legal options, since this report has all the earmarkings of a deliberate attempt at restraint of trade, not to mention libel.”

Of course he's sticking to his guns. Farah -- who advised Donald Trump to jump aboard the Birther bandwagon and who devoted his National Tea Party Convention speech to a defense of Birtherism, -- is deeply invested in the story. And it's in the nature of conspiracy theorists never to give up in the face of devastating evidence, but rather to transform that evidence into further proof of their conspiracy theory.

Gee, I wonder if Sean Hannity will ask Corsi about this the next time he has him on his Fox show.

All this is coming on the heels of the news that Corsi's book was written with the help of far-right white nationalists. Just yesterday, as Eric Hananoki at Media Matters reported, one of the nation's most prominent white nationalists popped up and claimed credit for having helped assemble portions of the book:

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There is someone who even tops Donald Trump's Birtherism and that's Jerome Corsi of WND.

A QUESTION OF ELIGIBILITY
Nordyke numbers expose Obama document fraud? Newly found details about birth registration show president's certificate out of sequence

It's been said that there's a sucker born everyday and that makes people like Jerome Corsi a ton of cash. Conspiracy theories seem to be recession proof. Maybe each state that has budgetary problems should start a phony Obama conspiracy and sell books, t-shirts and mugs based on it. Lou Dobbs can then go from state to state and just ask the questions that everybody wants answers to.

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It's incredible. Unbelievable. That Trump presidential bid is going big, baby -- as in the biggest, fastest collapse of a candidacy in history. Oh yeah.

From Public Policy Polling:

Donald Trump has had one of the quickest rises and falls in the history of Presidential politics. Last month we found him leading the Republican field with 26%. In the space of just four weeks he's dropped all the way down to 8%, putting him in a tie for fifth place with Ron Paul.

Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney are at the top of the GOP race with 19% and 18% respectively. Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are further back at 13% and 12%, followed by Trump and Paul at 8%, Michele Bachmann at 7%, and Tim Pawlenty at 5%.

As Trump got more and more exposure over the last month Republicans didn't just decide they weren't interested in having him as their nominee- they also decided they flat don't like him. Only 34% of GOP voters now have a favorable opinion of Trump to 53% who view him in a negative light.

Maybe this is why Trump was on Fox last night with Martha MacCallum and complained bitterly about how he's being treated in the press. Apparently, it's bad for the country to criticize great leaders like Donald Trump, even when they make utter buffoons of themselves by trumpeting easily disproven conspiracy theories:

MACCALLUM: ...You know, when you go home at night and you talk to your wife and you think about all this, how does get -- this hammering, in your words, how does that get factored into the decision?

TRUMP: Well, I think it's very bad for the country. And it doesn't affect my decision because I think I have a pretty thick skin. But I think it's very bad for the country because the kind of people -- and I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about generally speaking. The kind of person you need to run this country has to be somebody that really has accomplished a lot because he's got to accomplish -- he or she has to accomplish a lot for the country.

The guy is so completely out to lunch that his Republican fans are fleeing him in droves. Ah, Donald, we hardly knew ye. Because there was so little to know.

Makes you wonder why the hell Trump got trotted out for public consumption in the first place. And then I remembered: He was always a stalking horse who'd make the rest of the Republican presidential field look sane and intelligent by comparison.

That, and he had one other good use. Eric Boehlert caught this one a couple of weeks ago, when Andrea Tantaros told some accidental truth on O'Reilly's show:

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Let the man speak. He's got a bigger megaphone than Romney, Pawlenty, Gingrich, than all of them combined. And you know what; he can drive up Obama's negatives more than any of the other of those GOP candidates.

Sure. He can self-immolate like the flaming gasbag he is on his own good time. But what he may have done instead is accidentally drive up Obama's positives: They got one look at a real comparison between the two men last week, and it wasn't even a contest.

I am a white Jewish American. My family escaped--often in a sprint, sometimes prostrate on the bottom of a rowboat—Cossacks and communists and Nazis so that I might be here today. Many of them didn’t make it.

I live in the middle of Los Angeles. Gay people are everywhere and considered as normal as anyone else. Black people too. Persians, Buddhists, Sikhs, astrologers and witches are ho-hum. My mechanic is Pakistani. I probably run into more Latinos everyday than I do white people. When I grew up, our mayor was black. Today our mayor is Hispanic. No one seems to notice.

It is a privilege to live like this. It is lovely.

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And obviously I reside in La La Land because yesterday, Birth Certificate Day, punched me in the mouth. I was stricken, paralyzed with rage.

To see laid bare the brazen racial hatred coursing through the blood of so many millions of people who also call themselves American, well it actually made me cry. I’d thought, in 2011, that we were better than that. We aren’t. We are still desperately sick. And it made me ashamed before all of those that we continue to torment.

I should have known better. About ten years ago, I went to a wedding in Memphis, Tennessee, which included a preliminary lunch at the home of some fantastically polite and generous white people in the suburbs. They fed us lavishly. Laughed at our jokes. Expressed real interest in our pursuits and lives back home. They loaned us their car. They offered us a place to sleep “anytime.” They were basically the nicest people I had ever met in my life.

Then the 40-year-old woman who lived in this beautiful house asked what we had planned that night. “We’re going to check out Beale Street,” I answered like a typical tourist. Her face flinched a fraction in disappointment and concern. “Oh,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s a bit dark down there?” “Dark?” I smirked like an idiot. “The whole place is lit up like high noon in neon lights.”

And then we elected a black president.

I know racism persists. Arizona, “Ground Zero Mosque” and “Mau Mau” are ominous signs of this despicable cancer. But I was not prepared for this buffoon, this nauseating jester of unflagging privilege, to amplify this revolting malice. To feed his ugly sucking egomania, Donald Trump opted to speak for those people in Tennessee and so many others. Black people, he lied again and again, are not good enough to be president. Black people are not good enough for Harvard. Black people are lesser. Illegitimate. Frauds and Conmen. It is high time that these people relearned their place. In short, he raved, “The Blacks” are Not Us.

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I have been rejected. I have lost. I have failed. But I cannot imagine what it must feel like to listen to this malignant rebuff, this dehumanizing talk essentially of elimination from the mix of America itself. I realize that at least some of this bile is opportunism. The opposition stokes racial animus not from conviction, but simply to tilt the balance of power. Many don’t mean it. It’s just Nixon and Rove’s amoral and effective tool.

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I'm trying to come up with a term to describe the Birthers' frenzied attempts to definitively uncover evidence that Obama's long form birth certificate is a forgery. 'After-Birthers' seems about right.

Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft debunked the document in fifty two seconds on YouTube. He declares it's a fraud. Wow, wouldn't you think Obama could come up with something a little better than that? He does have the CIA at his disposal. Hoft easily unmasked the counterfeit because he's a graphic artist and can tell. I was always waiting for him or some other lunatic like Pam Geller to break into the hospital in Hawaii to try and locate the original. G. Gordon Liddy and his crew of plumbers are too old now.

I wasn't really down with Obama releasing it, but watching these nutcases make fools of themselves makes it pretty much worth it. They just can't handle that Obama is a Democrat and black.

Digby:

I'm sure there are other theories about the "usurpation" I haven't run across. But the fact that there are so many proves that these people are determined to find a way to defend their primitive belief that this man is not a legally elected president. And that belief lies in their fundamental, bedrock definition of what constitutes a Real American -- a white, Christian conservative. There's no way they will ever be able to reconcile the idea that a black Democrat could legitimately represent a majority the American people. Clearly, they will rewrite history and the constitution if they have to in order to make that case.