Palin, Obama conspiracies and more...

Yes, posting has been a bit light; I'm on a project. But we can still check around and see what's up...

Clintonism? Politico claims that cogs from the Clinton machine have been showing up in the Obama machine...

These are not, for the most part, Clinton die-hards, much less anyone who could be accused of being a Clinton mole. A hard core of loyal staffers surround Clinton at the State Department, but most of her former campaign aides have moved on, having shed their ties to a campaign that was not exactly defined by loyalty and esprit de corps. Their rise, though, reflects a somewhat expected sense of unity within a Democratic Party that, while headed by Obama, hasn’t been remade or purged or dominated by a president who has rarely been criticized for excessive loyalty. The bad blood many anticipated between the Obama and Clinton camps either never materialized or has long since been relegated to the political history books.

The bad blood certainly exists in the rank and file. I believe that the memories remain raw throughout the party. On the other hand, if you are not a Republican and if you seek to make a living as a political animal (not a dishonorable goal)...where ya gonna go?

Conspiracy: Palin! Professor Brad Sharlott of Northern Kentucky University has written a detailed paper explaining why he thinks the rumors are true -- Sarah Palin is the grandmother, not the mother of Trig. (Summary here.)

At first, I scoffed: Can an academic monograph be peer-reviewed if your peers are paranoids? But closer examination reveals that Sharlott has raised some good points. Apparently, Palin was in Texas when she started labor; nevertheless, she gave a speech, then made a 20 hour journey home.

Of course, you would expect a conservative to have a dismissive attitude toward labor.

Sharlott even uses Photoshop on photos of the pregnant (or should that be "pregnant" in quotation marks?) Palin to prove that she was, in fact, wearing padding. Shades of the Bush Bulge!

I've done a rather subtler job of Photoshopping myself. (Stand aside, prof -- let a pro have a go.) And yeah, it does look as though she is wearing something squarish over her belly. Why the padding would take on a square look is beyond me, but there it is. For what it is worth, you can also "see" through her blouse well enough to make out the top of her bra -- if, y'know, you're into that sort of thing.

Do I believe in this theory? Not really. But stirring the stew can be fun.

Admittedly, Palin's refusal to cough up Trig's birth certificate is a little odd -- especially when one considers how many of her fellow Republicans have made political hay out of Obama's birth certificate.

Conspiracy: Obama! In rightwinger-land, the COB (certificate of birth) is no longer considered the hot document. What they're concerned about is Obama's Social Security card, or the number thereon.

His number is one set aside for applicants from Connecticut -- yet Obama was never a resident of that state. Bill O'Reilly (of all people) tried to explain away this anomaly by claiming that Barack Obama Sr. lived in Conn. But he didn't.

(Fair warning: If you want to check out the links for this story, you'll be heading into some toxic locales.)

I dismissed the COB nonsense from the get go, but -- to be frank -- this one seems harder to shrug off. An explanation may well come forward one of these days. Right now, though, my eyebrows are furled. Hmmmmmmm.

Perhaps the SSN affair may have some linkage to my own oft-derided pet theory that young Obama was recruited by the CIA. Titter ye not, ye scoffing scoffers: See here and here and here.

The right wing never quite knew what to do with that line of research. A few wingnuts linked to my posts, if only because those articles suggested that Obama was not on the up-and-up. But most conservatives avoided those stories, even though my pieces had at least some evidence behind them, while the COB rumors were based on vapors. Presumably, this avoidance-reaction occurred for ideological reasons. The idea of Obama engaging in anti-Soviet spookery hardly conveniences the GOP's preferred narrative.

Consider this, which details the work of an investigator named Susan Daniels:

After uncovering the Selective Service application of September 1980 wherein Obama first used his SSN, she could not find a single document he’d written that number down on until six years later in Chicago. This gap of time is quite curious because in 1981, a year after he first used his SSN, Obama visited ‘friends’ in India and Pakistan for three weeks. It would have been impossible for that visit to happen without leaving a SSN trail for Ms. Daniels to uncover. This is because no American citizen is allowed to visit a foreign country unless he is first issued a passport; and, of course, that document can not be issued unless the citizen reveals his SSN. Since Ms. Daniels can find no proof that Obama applied for a passport to visit Pakistan, it must therefore be assumed that no American passport was issued to him. If that is the case, then how did he visit the country?

Multiple passports are a "tell" indicating that someone may be working for an intelligence service.

Alas, the wingnuts looking into this mystery usually discredit themselves by bringing Bill Ayers into the situation. Y'see, they think that evil Ayers was the one who gave Obama a fake SSN and a fake passport. Of course, there is zero evidence that Ayers had anything to do with the matter. (Yeah, he learned something about acquiring fake IDs while underground. So what does that prove?)

There's also the question of motive: Why on Earth would Obama and Ayers do such a thing? Let's imagine the phone call:

"Hey, Bill -- this is Barry. Listen, could you whip me up a fake SSN and a fake passport? I'm going to make a trip to Asia and this seems the easiest way to go about it."

I mean, come on. Get real, wingnuts: If you're talking about the use of fake passports to get into a faraway international hot spot close to a war zone, you're talk See-freakin'-Eye-Ay. Don't pretend otherwise simply because you're trying to push some bullshit propaganda line about Barack-the-bolshie.

Wikipedia lists five incidents involving faked passports. Four of the five involve intelligence operations. The fifth example goes to a very strange 2005 incident involving actor Wesley Snipes -- and now I'm starting to wonder what the hell he has been up to.

The Obama ID conundrum is, I think, worthy of investigation. Unfortunately, the well has, to some degree, been poisoned. In a world where weltanschauung determines reality, objective research becomes nearly impossible. The right wingers will look into the SSN/passport matter, but they will always feel compelled to twist the story to fit their absurd "Obama the socialist" narrative. Meanwhile, the Dems -- even the growing number who feel alienated from Obama -- won't look into anything that carries even the slightest odor of Glenn Beckian ickiness.