I kinda feel sorry for sane, intelligent Republicans these days. There are such people…lots of 'em. And they must be cringing and writhing to see their party represented by tea-baggers, birthers, deathers, Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, and folks whose idea of democracy is that you mass at town hall meetings and just try to shout everyone else down, screaming that Obama was born in Kenya. My Conservative pal Roger visibly winces at the suggestions that Rush Limbaugh is "the" face of the G.O.P. because Roger thinks that Limbaugh cares only about getting people to listen to him, not about winning elections.
But these folks are only part of the problem. Another part is Republican politicians who are deathly afraid of them. I think most Senators and Congressfolks on that side of the aisle know well that the idiots are idiots. Trouble is, they're useful idiots. They vote. They donate money. They work for candidates. And as much as they hate Democrats, they're even more rabid against Republicans they think are weak on their pet issues…or worse, turncoats. So if you're a G.O.P. guy in office and you want to stay in office, you have to kind of wink at them and say non-confrontational things about how they have some valid points and are raising questions that must be addressed.
There was a period in my life (a brief one, thankfully) when I found myself around a lot of folks who were convinced of all sorts of major conspiracies in the Kennedy assassination, including a few that were but one notch closer to reality than a scenario in which JFK was offed by a band of Venusians. I went in, thinking that what these people craved was an answer they could believe in, but soon discovered that that was the last thing they wanted. There were such researchers and skeptics around but they were pretty much trampled into oblivion by a mob that could and would never be satisfied by any solution.
Most of them didn't even have one theory about who killed Kennedy. Some had a dozen mutually-exclusive theories (i.e., if #1 was true, numbers 2 through 12 could not have happened) and they got hysterical if you tried to take any one of those theories away from them. Every conceivable explanation was possible except, of course, that maybe the 35th President of the United States was killed by one lone nut with a rifle. One did not dare consider that possibility in their midst. That didn't get them anywhere.
In the same sense, the birthers really don't want definitive proof that Obama was born in Hawaii. That's of no use to their purpose, which is to pretend the nation didn't really elect a black Democrat who's kinda Liberal. In this article, Joe Conason reminds us how a lot of the same folks tried much the same thing with Bill Clinton, trying to de-legitimize his presidency by ginning up scandals that later evaporated for lack of any evidence. As long as Obama is in office, we're going to be hearing this nonsense. Get used to it.