Just when you think the crazy doesn't get any worse, they prove you wrong. Like this guy, whose pension and medical benefits are paid for by the taxpayers of this great nation, but who is just about as unpatriotic and disgusting as they get.

Via Foreign Policy:

"I have to admit that I'm a Birther," said SOS founder Larry Bailey, a retired 27-year veteran of the Navy SEALs, in an interview. "If there were a jury of 12 good men and women and the evidence were placed before them, there would be absolutely no question Barack Obama was not born where he said he was and is not who he says he is."

Bailey, who is part of the leadership of SOS's effort to mobilize thousands to take to the streets to denounce Obama's treatment of the military through an SOS project called Operation Street Corner, doesn't only believe that the president is a foreigner. He also believes that he is not actually the son of Barack Obama, Sr. Bailey trumpeted the conspiracy theory that the president is actually the love child of Ann Dunham and writer Frank Marshall Davis."

In his books, Obama said his mentor was a fellow named Frank Marshall Davis. Frank Marshall Davis was a member of Communist Party USA, he wrote for the communist party's Hawaii newsletter, he was a close friend of Obama's mother, and there's a strong case that Frank Marshall Davis rather than Barack Obama, Sr. was Barack Obama, Jr.'s father and that Barack Obama, Sr. was just an administrative father of convenience," Bailey said.

The crazy runs strong in this one, my friends. Evidently that taxpayer-funded healthcare isn't covering his meds. But he would also like you to know that he was one of the allied SwiftBoaters that aimed at Kerry in 2004, too. He's an equal opportunity kind of hater that way.

Bailey said he came up with the idea for SOS earlier this year and organized some fellow former special operations guys, mostly in their 60s and 70s, with the mission of helping Obama's opponent win.

"I had an idea that we could lend a hand to the effort of getting the White House expunged of what's there now and elect someone more to my liking," Bailey said.

Well there ya go. We should all bow to our military overlords, it seems.

The love child of Frank Marshall Davis. Wow. Who knew communism was genetic?

I suppose it would be impertinent of me to inquire as to how it can possibly be that Barack Obama was born in Kenya to an African-American writer who lived in Hawaii? Seems to me the whole "love child of Frank Marshall Davis and Stanley Ann Dunham" theory puts the birther theory in a dark deep hole and throws dirt over the top of it forever, doesn't it? Forget that there's no evidence that Obama's mother and Davis ever crossed paths, or that Davis was old enough to be her father.

This is how these theories go. First you find every black guy in Hawaii in the 60s. Then you narrow that list to the black guys that were vocal or activist in some way, particularly in the area of social justice. Then you assume, with no evidence whatsoever, that they had an affair with a 18-year old white college student. Ignore all actual evidence. That's not necessary. Papers are only important in Arizona. If you hate Barack Obama, papers are a hindrance.

It's far better to theorize about who his father might be rather than pay attention to factual information about who his father actually was.

It's far better to imagine he can simultaneously not be a US citizen and still born to two US citizens having an illicit affair than it is to actually understand that he is a US citizen.

These people are seriously deranged and in my opinion, dangerous.

(Sung to the tune of "The Twelve Days of Christmas")

On the first day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Obama's born in another country.

On the second day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

On the third day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Thank the one percent
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

On the fourth day of Christmas
Republicans told me
We don't torture
Thank the one percent
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

On the fifth day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Tax cuts more revenues bring
We don't torture
Thank the one percent
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

On the sixth day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Half the people no taxes paying
Tax cuts more revenues bring
We don't torture
Thank the one percent
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

On the seventh day of Christmas
Republicans told me
Government Reagan was trimming
Half the people no taxes paying
Tax cuts more revenues bring
We don't torture
Thank the one percent
Gay marriage is like box turtle love and
Obama's born in another country

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Like Survivor, the alliances are beginning to form in advance of the first round of primary purges. And like leeches on a willing host, Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are aligning around front-runner Donald Trump.

It really is pathetic. Donald Trump, the unserious candidate of the century, needs his Big Buddy Hannity to save him from that mean ole George Stephanopoulis, after a particularly awkward interview on ABC's Good Morning America yesterday morning.

In classic horror movie fashion, Sarah Palin is the zombie rising yet again from the dark and murky corners. Her host this time? The Donald, of course.

I clipped this short excerpt about Trump, but in the full segment she goes on about how fortunate we all are that we have fair and balanced media so that candidates can be sure to control their message, and how glad she is for Facebook and social media to get her message out. Oh, happy day.

As usual, Palin and Hannity never really come out and say a certificate of live birth is a lesser document. They run this from two tangents. First, Palin claims that the Donald really wants to talk about serious issues like oil but GSteph keeps pushing the conversation back to his birtherism. Second, and offered in an almost offhand way as if to downplay it (but not really), Palin repeats the assertion that the president just hasn't answered this question directly. Because evidently producing this certificate of live birth which was acceptable for both of my children's passports, Social Security cards and drivers licenses, post-Patriot Act is simply inadequate in some ephemeral, undefined universe. Translation: We know it's really stupid but it's effective so we're going to keep flogging it.

They're all glomming onto the Iowa poll Rachel Maddow mentioned on her show tonight showing that 74% of Iowa Republicans think Barack Obama was not born in the United States, or they're not sure if he was. Take this poll for what it's worth. It was an automated poll, and the questions seem almost guaranteed to trigger responses that fit an expected outcome. Nevertheless, it encourages people like Donald Trump to keep...trumpeting, with Sarah Palin floating along on his purse strings coattails.

Later in the show, Michele Bachmann jumps on the bandwagon too. Why the heck not? It seems like the economy and international scene can be damned to these incredibly banal and worthless candidates in favor of a blowhard with a bad toupee' who wants to invade Middle Eastern countries and take their oil as bounty.

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Haley Barbour, marionette master:

A reporter followed up to ask Barbour for his opinion as to why so many Americans (wrongly) think Obama is a Muslim.

"I don't know why people think what they think," Barbour said. He paused and then added, "This is a president that we know less about than any other president in history."

There's a couple of possibilities here. Either Haley Barbour does not know how to read and therefore missed the two books written by Barack Obama about his life, his family and his outlook, or he's just being a divisive jerk. Or both.

Everyone knows I live in Southern California and it's supposed to be this liberal haven of the country. I've been rehabbing my nerve damage so I can't move around too freely, but my car hasn't had an oil change in a very long time. There's a Goodyear dealership that did a good job the last time I went there. Plus I can actually walk home from the place while the work's being done. So I went to get the long-awaited service. I was helped by the owner of the place and after we chatted about what I needed, we went inside so he could write up the order as my car was taken inside and put up on a lift.

As we were at his computer, finishing up the input of our transaction, I saw that Fox News was on his TV and I jokingly said, "Oh, you have Fox News on?" He said, "I didn't put it on, but so what? What's wrong with it?" I said, "It's a propaganda network." He asked, "People can tell what the truth is, so who cares even if there is only ten percent of the truth?" I pointed out that for most people, it's hard to know which ten percent is the truth. That was my first mistake. There were a few other customers behind me, but that didn't faze the owner, as he then launched into a profanity-laced tirade against politicians and of course, the cancer of our society, the unions.

"Those fat bastards are making $500.00 an hour and taking my money and stuffing it in their pockets while they sit on their fat and useless asses." I was kind of stunned by his tantrum, and I know I should have kept quiet and just gotten out of there, but instead I replied: "You know, less than 1% of the country is unionized, so I think it's a little more complicated than that." I'm used to debating people about politics all the time either on the radio, online or TV, so it was like an instinct, even though I only wanted an oil change.

He went ballistic and started to scream to me the historical meaning of President Obama's first (Barack) and middle (Hussein) name and finished off by saying, "...and why won't he let me see his f*&king birth certificate? Have you seen his birth certificate? "

"Yes, I have."

"You're f*&king brainwashed. You can't see the truth!"

A man behind me said, "Can I get my car please?" I turned to him and said. "I'm sorry, I didn't realize this would happen."

The owner kept on screaming about the f*&king scum of the parasitic unions and walked away from the counter after trying to explain in some form of right-wing gibberish why this country is in the toilet and left in a huff. The words that echoed were, "It's not Bush's fault."

Another employee had came over by that time and inputted the order and printed up my oil change request. I looked at him and he said, "I hear this all the time."

"All I wanted was an oil change."

"I'll call you when your car is ready."

How did I end up at a Birther-owned a Goodyear auto place? I realized yet again the influence of the right-wing noise machine and Fox. It's sad and very disturbing when you take it out of our political world and see it alive in Americana. When I got the call a few hours later to get my car, I had printed out a copy of Obama's birth certificate (at the top of this post) and wanted to hand it to him to see what would happen, but I realized I wanted my car back instead.

Should I bring him a copy of President Obama's birth certificate just to see if actual evidence will make him change his mind? Or is the study posted in the Boston Globe correct, and actual evidence will only make him believe even more firmly that Obama is not born here?

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Louisiana Republican Senator David Vitter has a new fetish. Three years after Americans learned of Vitter's predilection for prostitutes and diapers, Senator Vitter has announced his support for Birther lawsuits challenging President Obama's eligibility to serve.

Vitter's apparent attempt at misdirection comes after a torrent of bad news for the one-time family values merchant turned DC Madam regular. After allegations that he kept aide Brent Furer on his staff despite an outstanding warrant for his arrest on a DUI charge and, worse still, a report that he attacked his ex-girlfriend with a knife two years ago. Even more egregious, Furer was Vitter's apparent point man on women's issues. (Unsurprisingly, leading conservative women's groups have remained silent on Vitter, as have Sarah Palin and her new wave of "pro-life feminists" so highly touted on the right.) And now, Vitter has a Republican challenger in the upcoming Louisiana primary.

So, finding the truth was not setting him free, Vitter at a town hall meeting threw his weight behind right-wing lawsuits concerning "Mr. Obama's refusal to produce a valid birth certificate." Like buying extra large Huggies in bulk at Walmart, Vitter said that's a "valid" course of action:

"I know all the information I've been able to get my hands on through the media. But obviously with the mainstream media as a filter, that's not a whole lot. I personally don't have standing to bring litigation in court. But I support conservative legal organizations and others who would bring that to court. I think that is the valid and most possibly effective grounds to do it."

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Virginia AG Ken Cuccinelli has been in the news a lot lately. You may have heard about the letter he wrote earlier this month to all of Virginia’s public colleges – UVA, VA Tech, William and Mary, etc. calling on them to drop policies banning discrimination against gays and lesbians. He claims they have no legal authority to adopt such policies.

Or maybe you heard Cuccinelli speculate about whether President Obama was born in the United States. In this recently unearthed recording from the campaign trail, Cuccinelli can be heard telling a birther that he might be able to challenge federal laws on the basis of Obama’s birth place:

Cuccinelli has since dashed off a denial, but the fun doesn’t stop there.

In another recently unearthed recording, Cuccinelli told a crowd that he’s worried about the government tracking his family. He said he might not register his newborn son for a Social Security number because "it is being used to track you." He also claimed that many other Americans aren’t registering for Social Security numbers for the same reason:

We're gonna have our 7th child on Monday, if he's not born before. And, for the very concerns you state, we're actually considering – as I'm sure many of you here didn't get a Social Security number when you were born, they do it now – we're considering not doing that. And a lot of people are considering that now, because it is being used to track you.

Cuccinelli’s hard line against gays, paranoia about the Social Security Administration, and openness to birther conspiracies prove that he is the real deal – a bona fide Teabagger of the highest order. And now he’s the chief legal officer of an entire state.

For anyone wondering what a Tea Party-controlled GOP might look like, keep your eyes on Virginia.

The Mayo Clinic, the world famous institution cited by all sides in the contentious health care debate, defines schizophrenia as a serious brain disorder "in which reality is interpreted abnormally" resulting in "hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking and behavior." Apparently, that affliction is now running rampant among supporters of the Republican Party. As recent polling about conservative beliefs regarding Medicare, taxes, supposed "death panels," President Obama's citizenship and more shows, the crisis of Republican schizophrenia has reached epidemic proportions.

Here, then, are the five symptoms of incurable Republican schizophrenia:

(If you exhibit one or more of these warning signs, see your physician immediately. If you don't have health insurance - and if your state voted Republican, you're much more likely not to - Democrats will try to provide it for you.)

1. "Keep Government Out of Medicare." In July, Rep. Bob Inglis (R-SC) described an angry constituent who confronted him at a South Carolina town hall meeting, "keep your government hands off my Medicare." Despite his best efforts to explain that Medicare is a government program, the voter, Inglis lamented, "wasn't having any of it."

But as new data from Public Policy Polling revealed, that same cognitive failure is now far more widespread than swine flu. While 39% of all Americans responded that the government should "stay out of Medicare," 59% of self-identified conservatives and 62% of McCain voters hold that oxymoronic view.

2. "Barack Obama is a Muslim." An April survey by the Pew Research Center showed that 11% of Americans believe Barack Obama is a Muslim, a figure largely unchanged since its polling started in March 2008. Yet 17% of Republicans and 19% of white evangelicals (74% of whom voted for John McCain) insist the President is an adherent of Islam, despite his repeated pronouncements and decades of church attendance to the contrary.

3. "Barack Obama Was Not Born in the United States." This contagion is running rampant among the ranks of Republicans. And even with repeated treatments of birth certificates and Hawaiian newspaper announcements from 1961, there is apparently no cure.

A DailyKos/Research 2000 poll found that a stunning 58% of Republicans did not believe (28%) or were unsure (30%) that President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States. To be sure, this is a Southern pathology, a region home to 69% of all birthers and the only part of the country to increase its Republican presidential vote in 2008. This week's PPP survey only confirmed the chronic birtherism plaguing the Republican Party:

Only 62% of respondents reported believing that Obama was born in the United States. 10% thought he was born in Indonesia, 7% thought he was born in Kenya, 1% thought he was born in the Philippines, and 20% weren't sure. Among Republicans 44% think he was not born here while just 36% believe that he was.

(In a promising development, only 10% of respondents weren't sure if Hawaii is part of the United States. On this score, conservatives were only slightly more confused than liberals and moderates.)

4. "Government Death Panels Will Euthanize My Grandma." Sadly, the Republicans' Birther and Deather psychoses represent a cradle-to-grave illness.

Despite the vaccinations administered by PolitiFact, ABC News, the New York Times and countless other care-givers, Republicans persist in their virulent health care death panel delusions. This out-of-control CTD (conservative transmitted disease) has spread like wildfire, thanks to vectors like Betsy McCaughey, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. (Even a Republican like Senator Chuck Grassley, previously diagnosed by President Obama as sane, came down with the deather flu.)

An NBC poll this week quantified the deather madness: a staggering 45 percent said it's likely the government will decide when to stop care for the elderly. (Majorities also wrongly believe that reform proposals on the table would constitute a government "takeover" of the health care system, one which would cover illegal aliens.)

As MSNBC noted, viewers of Fox News - a strong predictor of Republican allegiance - were overwhelmingly afflicted by this health care dementia:

In our poll, 72% of self-identified FOX News viewers believe the health-care plan will give coverage to illegal immigrants, 79% of them say it will lead to a government takeover, 69% think that it will use taxpayer dollars to pay for abortions, and 75% believe that it will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing care for the elderly.

5. "President Obama Raised Taxes on Working People." The Republicans' profound cognitive disorders are not limited to their hallucinations about Barack Obama's birth or the health care imbroglio. As the Tea Party movement shows, furious right-wing zealots are outraged by no taxation with representation.

As promised, Barack Obama in the stimulus package delivered on his pledge of tax relief for 95% of American households. Obama's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) didn't only jump start gross domestic product and refill empty state coffers in the second quarter of 2009. As Nate Silver thoroughly documented, "Obama has cut taxes for 98.6% of working households."

Nevertheless, frothing at the mouth Tea Baggers spouting Republican Tax Day lies took to the streets not to thank the President, but to blame him for the tax cuts they received. While Andrew Sullivan described their unreasoning mania as "adolescent, unserious hysteria," the Daily Show's Jon Stewart diagnosed their disorder:

"I think you might be confusing tyranny with losing."

Back in April, I appropriated Daniel Patrick Moynihan's classic statement to conclude that with their rag-tag band of revolutionaries, secessionists and agitators for violence, Republicans were "defining political deviancy down." Sadly, the delusional and the deviant are now descending on town hall meetings with guns. The Republican schizophrenics are no longer just a danger to themselves.

UPDATE: Newsweek adds the "Five Biggest Lies in the Health Care Debate" to its list of "Seven Falsehoods About Health Care." Meanwhile, the RNC added to a new pathology, suggesting in a poll that "GOP voters may be discriminated against for medical treatment" under a Democratic health care plan.

(This piece originally appeared at Perrspectives; the image via Huffington Post.)

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There's nothing new under the sun, especially when it comes to the frothing at the mouth right-wing rage over health care reform. But thanks to the 24/7 media's transformation of politics into just another form of entertainment, delusional Birthers, deceitful Deathers, raging Teabaggers and town hall intimidators are dominating press coverage of the debate. And it's all a recurring symptom, Rick Perlstein argues in the Washington Post, of a nation in which "crazy is a preexisting condition."

In his instant classic Nixonland, Perlstein documented how Richard Nixon, "a serial collector of resentments," fanned the flames of racism, anti-communism and the budding culture war not only to take power in his time but to help produce a bitterly divided America in ours. Now in his Washington Post op-ed, Perlstein makes clear that we've been here before.

The repeated outbreaks of "black helicopters" in the 1990's, the National Indignation Convention in 1961, cries that the Civil Rights Act would "enslave" whites and countless other episodes of seeming conservative madness, Perlstein reminds us, result from the combustible combination of authentic fear and manufactured outrage:

So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers -- these are "either" the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk of carrying a pistol around a president -- too heartfelt to be an act. The lockstep strangeness of the mad lies on the protesters' signs -- too uniform to be spontaneous. They are both. If you don't understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can't understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.

But Perlstein's cautionary tale is not merely one of the more things change, the more they stay the same. In its pursuit of entertainment over objective truth and conflict over common sense, he suggests, today's media environment rewards extremist claims and behaviors it once shunned:

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As tax cut-receiving Tea Baggers and town hall hecklers continue their tirades over health care reform, their kin in the Obama birth certificate denial crowd perpetuate their mass delusion. But lost in the fury is what might be deemed the Iron Law of Birtherism. That is, the birther movement is strongest in precisely those states where Republicans poll best and health care is worst. And as it turns out, there is a Birther Corollary: education, working conditions and myriad other indicators of social failure are generally most dismal in the most red of states.

In the staggering DailyKos/Research 2000 poll released 10 days ago, a stunning 58% of Republicans did not believe (28%) or were unsure (30%) that President Barack Obama was in fact born in the United States. (Nationally, only 11% of Americans denied Obama's natural citizenship, with another 12% in doubt.) This is a uniquely Southern pathology, a region home to 69% of all birthers and the only part of the country to increase its Republican presidential vote in 2008. And to be sure, the old times there are not forgotten. As Dave Weigel of the Washington Independent concluded, "as many as three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didn't know where Obama was born."

That the birther movement would take hold in the states of the old Confederacy should come as little surprise. While Americans rejected George W. Bush's Republican Party on Election Day in November, in counties across much of the South voters actually increased their support for the GOP candidate John McCain over Bush four years earlier. The interactive New York Times map above tells the tale of November's losers still fighting their failed 2008 campaign by other means:

That helps explains why when it comes to the delusion over Obama's citizenship, as Steve Benen observed, one of these things is not like the other:

"Outside the South, this madness is gaining very little traction, and remains a fringe conspiracy theory. Within the South, it's practically mainstream."

But that brand of racial flat-earthism is not all that's practically mainstream in the South.

Consider, for example, abysmal health care.

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