horizontality, the queen of the wingnuts

There's this dentist, see, who came from Russia, where it was really really bad. I assume she was attacked by communists there. So she came here to America, the Beautiful, by way of Israel, I think, where she got her dental degree (although I'm not sure of that, either).

She also got a law degree! One of the wonderful things about America, the Beautiful, is that you can keep learning your whole life. (I suppose that's true elsewhere, but probably not Russia, what with all the communists.) And so when she heard the troubling news about that foreign sounding guy that "won" the election, she was ready, with her law degree thing. She looked for plaintiffs. She was going to fight this usurper, by golly!

She got several plaintiffs. One of them is a calm guy named Alan Keyes. You might remember his various runs for various political positions. He might have "won" the election himself, if not for that foreign guy. Another is a fine officer named Cook who signed up as a plaintiff in February and then volunteered to go to Afghanistan in May and THEN sued, well, pretty much everyone, to get out of his "deployment". Then he was surprised that his commanding officers rescinded his orders before he could go to court.

Surely there are other plaintiffs out there, military men and women, who are as patriotic as Mr. Cook! Surely the dentist can sign some of them on to defy orders and make lots of seriously ugly statements about the Commander-in-Chief!

Surely she knows all the military laws that apply to such folks, with her online degree and all.

For heaven's sake, surely she knows intellectual property laws should be preventing her from cutting and pasting entire news articles, including advertisements and sidebars, onto her own site, which she regularly touts as being a Very Popular Site. That's the least of most people's problems with her, but it really bugs me.

It makes one wonder what IS required to become a lawyer/dentist in California, really.

*her name plus four blanks. Okay, the blanks are H,I,N,O.

**I know I already talked about wingnuts this week, but man.

Conspiracy theories are interesting. Conspiracy theorISTS are mind-bogglingly fascinating.

And there are a whole bunch in active mode at the moment! (Observer bias may be a factor here. Maybe there are always this many active ones going on, but I just haven't noticed.)

The one I'm following right now is the "omg obama took over the white house with no proof at ALL and he must have been born in kenya and if not maybe he was adopted by an indonesian. Or maybe the law gives us OTHER WAYS TO REMOVE HIM if we can get our hands on the law, darn it" one. (I cleaned up the spelling.) You would think this would be easily resolved, but here's the thing. Conspiracy theorists don't start with facts on their side. They start with a goal-ish desire to actually get rid of facts. "I don't want to give my kids shots, because I don't understand them." "The earth can't be THAT old, because I don't understand how the holy books and science books could possibly be reconciled." "I never heard of that foreign-sounding guy before so he must be an alien USURPER OMG." "I tried model rockets and it looked nothing like that and plus the flag MOVES; explain THAT!"

Anyway. So I can't possibly give you the flavor of these birther folks' arguments, because they get reallllllly involved. They involve both communists and mobsters, which is pretty alarming, right? Right?

But the best part about these guys is that they manage to combine their theories with the other ones! They are convinced that the communist mobsters are behind the swine flu virus, you know, to distract from the monster birth certificate problem, and also the financial "crisis" (quotes theirs), also to distract from the birth certificate, and that they pay off the Clintons and Gores, and don't get them started on the huge global warming hoax, what with the winters and all.

I had no idea.