- Whether Obama was not born in Hawaii is a conspiracy theory which would include the acquiescence of a long cast of characters.

- Whether a person who was a citizen of a foreign nation – at the time of his birth – can be President and Commander In Chief of the US armed forces is a legal question, not a conspiracy theory.

It’s been very convenient for Obama’s protectors to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater by lumping this genuine legal question in with the conspiracy theory. When my case was being litigated, virtually every main stream media source other than the Washington Times – where Tom Ramstack interviewed me and checked everything before publishing an accurate story – mentioned my case as a conspiracy theory concerning Obama’s BC despite all of my efforts to keep the issues separate.

http://naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/major-cooks-pleadings-waived-obamas-british-birth-issue-so-judge-lazzaras-holding-is-technically-accurate/

Just as interesting, all of the comments to-date deal with the “birthers” or the substance of their particular delusion, so I heartily agree with your point:

“Some number of people do, however, have a compelling need indeed to believe in improbable things that conform to ideological preferences.”

My concern is this. How have our admittedly flawed media, and other institutions of civil society been so overwhelmed by the rants of those whose ideology and belief system has overtaken their reason?

“The way out of this cycle of paranoia would be to burnish some less flawed, more-or-less mainstream authorities — a church? disinterested scholarship? anything could do the trick.”

I hope you’re right, but I fear that too many dollars and political gains are cynically tied up in fostering, amplifying and exploiting fringe memes for this to stop of its own volition. What would happen at FOX, CNN and MSNBC if all they had were verifiable news stories and honest, informed comment? How would they fill the remaining 20 hours each day?

Were I he, I’d let these people make all the rope they want too. Politically, personally, he has absolutely nothing to lose from ignoring them.

I’ve dealt in like manner with questions from colleagues I did not wish to dignify, and found in the howls of wounded outrage, cold shoulders, and broken friendships resulting not side-effects but dividends, and fortification for my self-respect as a gentleman of honor. That, and enough belly laughs in private, and especially in public before my interrogators’ newly-murderous faces to ride out a year without cable. My residual regrets, from proverbial Monday hindsight, came in the form of wistful hopes foregone that I had failed to stonewall the creeps sooner, and not played the patrician quite so much in the attempted masking of my Olympian, almost otherworldy, even (thank you, Snagglespuss, that will be all, already), disdain.