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Another plane might have crashed into some bomb-sniffing dogs in Pennsylvania, on its way to an unprotected White House. None of the 9/11 targets would have received special protection as a result of anything in the August 6 PDB. Nor, of course, was the single most important fact—that terrorists would use commercial airplanes as cruise missiles—mentioned as a possibility.

True, the title of the PDB was “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.” I have a memo titled “Actress Determined to Succeed in Hollywood.”

This is textbook mob behavior. As Le Bon writes:

Evidence, if it be very plain, may be accepted by an educated person, but the convert will quickly be brought back by his unconscious self to his original conceptions. See him again after the lapse of a few days and he will put forward afresh his old argument in exactly the same terms. He is in reality under the influence of anterior ideas, that have become sentiments, and it is such ideas alone that influence the more recondite motives of our acts and utterances. It cannot be otherwise in the case of crowds.53

Bush was the enemy, Rove his evil genius, so it didn’t matter what the facts were. Hollywood would supply the rewrite.

There’s your “reality-based community.”

FIVE

I’LL SEE YOUR BIRTH

CERTIFICATE CONSPIRACY

THEORY AND RAISE YOU

ONE OCTOBER SURPRISE

Democrats tell fantastic lies, they drag the whole country through their investigations and criminal prosecutions—and then, when the commotion turns out to have been another wild-goose chase, the whole incident drops down the memory hole. Then liberals return to accusing right-wingers of being crazy conspiracy theorists.

The one lonely myth believed by more Republicans than Democrats is that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and is therefore ineligible to be president. The “birther” theory was concocted by liberals and shot down by the conservative media. According to John Avlon, the author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, it was a Hillary Clinton supporter who publicized the claim that Obama wasn’t born in the United States during the 2008 presidential campaign.1

The allegation was promptly investigated and disproved by every major conservative news outlet—The American Spectator, Human Events, National Review, Fox News, and the Sweetness & Light blog, among others. Indeed, it was Sweetness & Light that coined the term “birther.” There were small newspaper announcements of his birth at the time in the local press. The “short-form” birth certificate Obama posted on his webpage was determined to be the usual version sent out by the hospital and accepted by the State Department as a “birth certificate.”

In October 2008, Hawaii Health Department director Chiyome Fukino put out a statement saying that both she and the state registrar of vital statistics, Alvin Onaka, had personally verified that the health department had Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate. She reiterated that state law prohibited anyone without a tangible reason from obtaining a copy of the original. Instead the department would issue the short-form “certificate of live birth,” which had already been produced and posted by the Obama campaign on his website.

Then, in 2009, Fukino again put out a statement saying she had personally “seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen.”2

(Whatever Fukino and Onaka’s character and motives, the more people who must be lying for a conspiracy theory to work, the more implausible it is. Only two people—Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky—had to keep a secret about what happened in the Oval Office and, yet, within three years, the entire world knew.)

Some people continued to believe the “birther” story anyway. Of course, it might be easier to convince them if every other crazy conspiracy theory about Democrats