Birthers vs. the Truthers

I finally found a piece of journalism that lumps the Birthers in with the odious Truthers.

One point I'd emphasize is the continuing amnesia of liberals when it comes to their own paranoia and/or their tacit support of it. Here's Robinson:

If there has been a more clinically insane political phenomenon in my lifetime than the "birthers," I've missed it. Is this what our national discourse has come to? Sheer paranoid fantasy?

Really? Did Robinson miss the 9/11 truthers? This was the movement that insisted the U.S. government was in on, or even orchestrated, the 9/11 attacks. Such theories went from the simply nutty to full-on whackjob bonkers. Some, like former DNC Chair and then-presidential candidate Howard Dean simply entertained the "theory" that Bush was "tipped off" by the Saudis but let 9/11 happen anyway. Some, like Rosy O'Donnell argued that the conspiracy was so advanced that the inside job was “the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel.”

Actually you can argue that the thruthers are far more destructive to the public discourse then birthers will ever be. One side wants Obama to release his birth certificate like McCain did and the other thought an American president killed 3000 American citizens with a vastly complicated conspiracy involving thermite, inflicting national trauma, and involving perhaps hundreds of thousands of complicit parties.

One side doesn't trust Obama for being needlessly secretive (what's wrong with your Harvard grades?) and the other side doesn't trust the entire apparatus of government including the White House, Congress, the CIA and the FBI. Both are moonbats but the media only seems to have covered one of them.