Birthers

In a chat with my brother-in-law a month of so back I mentioned the birthers. Jo unhesitatingly dismissed the topic as too trivial for reasonable people to waste their time discussing (he has admirably high standards; I am more a We-cannot-live-forever-on-the-heights kind of person - OK, if you insist, a Wow, shiny objects kind of a person. And proud of it!). My response at the time was to say that I was prepared to bet that Obama's eventual assassin would be a birther, thus upping the seriousness count. I didn't actually contemplate that the conspiracy theory would move into the mainstream, or at least into the Republican mainstream, which seems to be happening.

Anyway, the odd thing is that to we outsiders the actual purported offence seems so inoffensive. Truthers, yes; we can agree that if the government had flown planes into tall buildings that would be a very bad thing. If Hilary Clinton had murdered Vince Foster, ditto, to a rather lesser extent. But for somebody born of an American mother who'd lived all his adult life in America to stand for president of America seems perfectly reasonable to any Australian - a minor technical breach at most. There's the Manchurian Candidate element, I suppose, to give sauce to the dish, but surely we need a string of hypothesized coverup murders to make this thing really filmic.