The right-wing radicals and conspiracy theorists of the Tea Party fringe revolution didn't embrace reality when President Obama released his long-form birth certificate last week, a move that, by all legitimate accounts, was a redundant nail in the coffin on the "birther" issue. As we saw with the immediate demands for the president's college records, the duplicitous truth did little to convince the boisterous bigots in this great nation that a man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama could ever be a legitimate leader of the free world.
And so it is without surprise that America is forced to accept the emergence of another great conspiracy movement: the Deathers.
This is not a joke. No, the paranoid skeptics of all things Obama are not demanding a long-form death certificate – yet – but they are doling out conspiracy after conspiracy as evidence that the president's announcement of the assassination of Osama bin Laden was a hoax at best and a bald-faced lie at worst.
Surprisingly, the explanations for how and why, though exhaustive, are quite compelling.
The timing is too coincidental to go unnoticed, and the sharp minds of our deep-thinking conspirators didn't miss a beat when it was pointed out that President Obama announced bin Laden's assassination eight years to the day from when President Bush infamously declared the end of combat operations in Iraq under the banner "Mission Accomplished."
If that's not enough, the announcement also "happened" to interrupt the Sunday night episode of Donald Trump's reality TV show Celebrity Apprentice, which some cognitively elevated theorists interpreted as the president's way of getting even with Trump for escalating the controversy over Obama's birth certificate in recent weeks.
Of course, Obama already landed quite a few heavy blows against Trump at the Saturday evening White House correspondents' dinner, but that too is now up for debate as a possible reason for the timely announcement of bin Laden's death. The president is consistently harassed by the right-wing media every time he steps out for a round of golf or a few laps up and down the basketball court – because obviously more pressing matters are being ignored if the president has time for leisure – and so it is possible too that Obama was preempting the expected criticisms of his "night of laughs" by delivering bin Laden's head on a platter the very next night.
Except bin Laden's head wasn’t delivered on a platter, which brings us to the other conspiracies.
His body was dumped in the ocean out of respect for Islamic burial customs, which the government conveniently cited as its reason for getting rid of the body within 24 hours. The alleged DNA testing and facial recognition scans that allegedly confirmed the alleged identity of the alleged 9/11 mastermind are all that America has to go on as proof that bin Laden didn't die seven years ago – as some claim; or that he never existed at all; or that he was a fake enemy created to justify the government's own role in hijacking planes on 9/11 and crashing them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon; or that he was frozen several years ago and kept in a secret (probably underground and heavily-guarded) location until the political atmosphere in the United States demanded a public announcement of his death.
And where are the photographs of bin Laden's dead corpse? And where is the video footage of the raid on his compound? And how could the Pakistani government somehow not know that he was holed up in a million-dollar fortress in a city full of retired and active-duty military officers? And isn't it interesting that the announcement coincided with the kickoff of Zombie Awareness Month?
In all seriousness, the conspiracy theorists may not be far off the mark when they question the truth and timing of Obama's announcement.
Capturing and killing the most loathed and feared terrorist on the planet provides an embattled president with a much-needed boost in the popularity polls. It buries the argument, prominent among the right-wing punditry, that Obama is weak and inexperienced not only as a commander of the military but as a diplomat of a mostly undefined foreign policy doctrine. Killing the mastermind behind 9/11 will not only boost the popularity of the president himself; it will also bolster the president's foreign policy agenda, which most recently added Libya to the list of Middle Eastern interventions.
Most importantly, it's approaching an election year, and as we all know, politicians will do anything to maintain power. That is the real conspiracy.
Obama isn't lying. He didn't thaw bin Laden's frozen zombie corpse only to throw it in the ocean after an alleged DNA test in order to get a boost in the polls. Obama's more complex than that. He, too, is a big-picture kind of guy – a long-term thinker. He ordered the raid and killed the terrorist and announced the assassination and dumped the body all in one day because it's too coincidental not to conjure conspiracy theories. It was conspiracy theories he wanted. He held onto the photos and the videos not because he hoped to thwart a backlash from al Qaeda radicals – who would surely try to avenge bin Laden's murder if images of their bloodied leader were published around the globe – but because doing so would encourage the already hyper-active, dot-connecting, big-picture puzzling lunatics of the extreme right to continue chasing invisible fairies on the South Lawn as the news cameras document the revolution.
In that sense, it is a conspiracy. It's a conspiracy to induce conspiracies so that sane Americans will identify the Republican Party as the responsible guardian of these idiots – first "birthers," now "deathers" – in the upcoming election.
The Democratic Party's bumper stickers are being shipped out of the press shop now: "Vote Sanity in 2012."
This isn't a conspiracy to trump Trump or get a bump in the polls. It's a conspiracy to get the conspirators conspiring.
Or it's not...
Chew on that a while.
(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)