Birthers, truthers, delighters and campaigns

So the President has released his birth certificate and so what? The State of Hawaii says he was born just where and when he always claimed to be. I'm hardly surprised.

I know perfectly well why the nation has been afflicted with "birtherism" for the last couple of years:

• Some fraction of the country just knows that a Black man can't be a natural born Amurrican .. isn't that obvious?

• Besides, how can anyone claim Hawaii is a state? They got more brown and yellow people than white people out there.

But that's not what I want to post about. What's getting to me at the moment is Republican elites' response to being called out about the 47 percent of their folks who are birthers: "But Democrats had/have truthers ..."

Truthers refers to the cohort that believed at times that George W. Bush or his government had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and let them happen. According to a poll by Rasmussen, in 2007, 35 percent of Democrats thought this was the case, not quite up to current Republican birther numbers, but a lot. After all, according to the 9/11 Commission: on August 6 2001, the President had been given a Daily Briefing headed: "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." A warning is not evidence, of course, but it's existence didn't quiet suspicions either.***I was never a truther, mostly because I don't tend to believe anyone's conspiracy theories. Big institutions can't pull off conspiracies and get away with them. People talk. (See also the leaks from the "secret" torture regime the U.S. adopted in the last decade.)

But I was always a "delighter" -- I believed that Dick Cheney, David Addington, and their neo-con fellows -- puppet-masters of the lazy Bush -- were thrilled that the 9/11 attacks gave them cover to shred constraints on executive authority.

They danced gleefully ahead, violating international norms for going to war and for war's conduct as well as tossing aside "quaint" notions of the immunity of citizens from law-free searches or incarceration without judicial redress. They loved 9/11 -- the deaths of several thousand in New York and Washington, complete with pictures, gave them license to fulfill their fantasies of imperial domination.

They remain untried war criminals whose escape from judicial examination disgraces this country. The current President seems to like their policies enough to make himself, if not their peer (I doubt he's a delighter; that's what passes for an upgrade these days), their accomplice after the fact in the destruction of the rule of law in this country.***These days, according to the AP, about 25 percent of independent voters are birthers. It's pretty obvious that the 75 percent of independents who are not (currently) birthers are the Obama re-election campaign's target for the release of the Hawaii document. Obama needs their votes in 2012, so he needs to rub in that Republicans are abetting idiotic believers in racist fantasies.

The birther obsession is an opportunity for the Obama campaign. He's getting his political mojo back in time for re-election. Somehow he doesn't seem so good at using it to govern.