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Remember when it was a crazy conspiracy theory to imagine Bill Clinton had carried on an affair with Gennifer Flowers? Or that he had flashed Paula Jones? Or that he had molested an intern in the Oval Office? Also remember when the mainstream media believed John Edwards’s denial of his affair with Rielle Hunter—and then believed him again when he said her illegitimate child wasn’t his? Remember how it took a quarter century to find out what really happened at Chappaquiddick? And remember when conservatives had the nutty idea that global-warming fanatics were cooking the books, but the mainstream media marginalized them by calling them insane? And remember how the entire Democratic Party, Hollywood, and the mainstream media lied about Alger Hiss, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, I. F. Stone, and dozens of other Soviet agents for nearly half a century until the Venona Papers came out?

Thanks, mainstream media!

Frankly, after all the media’s jaw-dropping cover-ups—always in the same direction—it’s amazing conservatives aren’t bubbling over with conspiracy theories. Instead, the conspiracy theories always come from liberals. Indeed, insane conspiracy theories are often being hatched in the illustrious outposts of the mainstream media, from CBS’s Dan Rather to the New York Times.

Presumably, if he cared to, Obama could request and release his “long-form” birth certificate. But he doesn’t want to. Liberals have intentionally fanned the flames of right-wing conspiracy-mongering in order to make all opposition to Obama seem deranged. Thus, in March 2010, Obama was able to dismiss the entire Tea Party movement as including “some folks who just weren’t sure whether I was born in the United States [or] whether I was a socialist.”

Those are two very different claims. It’s perfectly possible to believe Obama is a socialist—based, for example, on his socializing health care, the auto industry, and much of the banking industry and his statement that he thinks the government should “spread the wealth around”3—but not believe he was born in Kenya. Using Obama’s sentence structure, the anti-war Democrats included some folks who weren’t sure if President Bush should be assassinated or whether he was a right-winger.

It is liberals on TV, not conservatives, who are constantly yammering about Obama’s birth certificate. They’re not doing this to make conservatives look good. This is the only myth that begins to make conservatives look half as crazy as liberals.

In fact, however, there is not a single Republican in Congress who claims to believe President Obama was not born in this country. Even Salon’s major investigative report, titled “Birthers in Congress,” produced only a few elected Republicans making utterly innocuous remarks, such as Representative John Campbell (R-CA), who responded to a question about whether Obama was born in Hawaii by saying, “As far as I know, yes.” In liberal-land, that’s enough to be labeled a “birther.”4

Salon’s leading “birther in Congress” was Representative Bill Posey (R-FL) for simply having said he wouldn’t “swear on a stack of Bibles” that Obama was born in Hawaii. I wouldn’t swear on a stack of Bibles that Dennis Kucinich was born on Planet Earth, but apparently now Republicans are deemed to believe anything they don’t heatedly denounce.

The smoking gun of Posey’s alleged “birther” belief is that he introduced a bill that would require presidential candidates to produce their birth certificates. Inasmuch as it is a constitutional requirement that presidents be natural-born citizens, this is hardly an outrageous proposal.

But consider what Posey did not do.

He did not attempt to void a presidential election—as Senator Barbara Boxer and a handful of House Democrats did in voting not to ratify Ohio’s votes in the 2004 election based on the Left’s conspiracy theory about rigged Diebold voting machines.5

Posey did not say, “I believe it” of the birther theory, as DNC head Terry McAuliffe did of Michael Moore’s more