The Birther conspiracy conspiracy (part two)...

(First part here)

Look, if you all tell me either (a) that you have doubts about Obama's birth; or (b) everyone you're meeting on the street is a Birther, I'll shut up and change my mind. But I'm just not convinced that this is so important as everyone seems to be saying it is. Media Matters tells us that this movement is a creation of the conservative media. Rachel Maddow says, “This isn’t just one of the kooky things propounded by the violent far right fringe and at anti-government protests and on far right wing talk radio. The Birthers have actually made it as far as introducing legislation in the United States’ Congress.”



Compare, if you will, to Lev Grossman in TIME magazine, September 3, 2006, on people who doubt that Al Qaeda was behind the 9/11 attacks: "A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality."

Look, I’m sure there’s a few rich PACs and millionaires out there who are happy to pass their money on to G. Gordon Liddy to stir up some race-baiting trouble. But who amongst the elite in the GOP has actually stood up for these people publicly? There are ten Republicans in the House who called for a measure requiring birth certificates to be shown for future candidates for office. Even this is a fudge of a fudge: the sponsors aren’t even prepared to come out and say that they actually doubt Obama’s place of birth because they know it’s all rubbish. Only three of the ten even refused to vote for the recent Hawaiian resolution which explicitly stated that the island was Obama’s place of birth, designed by liberals to force a statement on the matter from Republicans (see here and here).

Meanwhile, even the usual toe-the-line right-wing crazies have been coming out against this. Even Ann Coulter has said the claims are false, for heck’s sake! Bill O’Reilly called the allegations “bogus ... no question about it.” And in discussion with Bernard Goldberg (whose only option was to conclude that the whole affair is a White House conspiracy to make the GOP look bad), he and Goldberg even argued that CNN and Lou Dobbs were only covering the topic for ratings. Dobbs, O’Reilly says, is a “renegade”!

True, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs have been keeping this going in irresponsible fashion. But even Dobbs has been unable to sustain his allegations, has rapidly become a public embarrassment, and is now just touting this line that there’s a problem with “transparency” rather than the actual issue the fuss is supposed to be about. Rather disingenuously, Dobbs has said, “I said, even though I believe the President is a citizen of the United States, I don’t understand why he shouldn’t produce a birth certificate.” So even the most radical public figures on this issue won’t actually stand up and defend it as an issue.

Moreover, I can’t prove it beyond reasonable doubt, but however much Wonkette wants to laugh about it, my gut says Eric Cantor’s kind of right to say that liberals as well as right-wing nutbags are keeping this in the public eye.

Let’s just look at what’s been going on with the Internet. The general consensus is that WorldNetDaily is the major Birther hotspot online. The WND petition on the matter has 443,000 signatures on it. Even if we accept them as all legitimate (which is, frankly, pretty unlikely for an online petition), this adds up to about a tenth of a percent of the population. I remember at some point hearing someone say that for every person who goes on a protest march there’s ten people at home who feel the same way. This, it seems, is a radically optimistic ratio to use for a website petition, but even if we do use it that would add up to just over 1 percent of the population who are really animated about this. I think that counts as fringe in my book.

This is only indicative, of course. I also had a look on Alexa to see how well WND is doing:

It had a spike just after the election, and another one just after all this stuff came out in the past week. But it hasn’t been growing traffic in any kind of way that would suggest a serious, growing membership base. (No wonder they rely on DailyKos polling.) In fact, get this: it turns out that “Michael Savage” is a far more common keyword search to get someone to WND than “Obama Birth Certificate.” Is it the Dobbs thing that’s got the hits in the past week? The crazy woman YouTube video? The August recess giving journalists nothing better to do? Healthcare? Who knows why this has suddenly hit the headlines, but there's no evidence yet that this is about to become politically significant.

Look at this, too. The following chart shows the search trend on Google for the keyword phrase “Obama birth certificate.” (The small red line is a search for “Birther”):

Again, you can see a few clear peaks: election, Xmas, inauguration, and the recent fuss. But we’re hardly talking about massive ongoing growth in interest, are we? Anyone who’s spent any time looking at these stats for their own sites will tell you that this is not a graph of rising interest. After each media-led peak, the thing sinks back to its former level.

To get a sense of perspective, take a look at this chart:

The blue line represents keyword searches for “obama birth certificate” again. The red line is “Miley Cyrus.”

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