Psy-ops of the Mind

This is fun stuff. John Cole:

Deep in this Ben Smith piece on the numerous conspiracy theories about Obama’s birth certificate and the desire by some on the right to get rid of the “birthers” is this nugget:

Meanwhile, the Birthers’ persistence has prompted another, competing conspiracy theory on the right.

“I’m not a conspiracist, but this could be a very big conspiracy to make conservatives disgrace themselves,” Medved said.

They have cultivated the crazy for so long that it is spinning out of control, and now they are struggling to reel it back in. I guess a years worth of whisper campaigns about Obama not being a citizen, being Muslim, being sworn in on the Koran, not covering his heart during the pledge of allegiance, and the rest of the nonsense is coming back to haunt them. And mind you, it wasn’t just whisper campaigns and email chains. They fed this baby. Prominent conservative Republican mouthpieces gave credibility to these rumors, and the newly annointed CPAC blogger of the year spent the better part of 2008 pushing pictures of Obama in “muslim-like” clothing.

And now they are so frustrated with their own creation that they are paranoid that it is a conspiracy to discredit them.

Joshua Marshall tweaks it further:

I just want to give props to the Democratic psyops operation that's paying off Michael Steele to get into a gonzo spat with Rush. Great work, guys.

When, over the span of at least a decade, you engage in constant up-is-downism, making your "own reality," pretending that the world is a few thousand years old (and thus a work like the Mahabharata was written before anything existed - miraculous!), spinning conspiracy after conspiracy, and trying to juggle a thousand lies at once, you're bound to start wondering what's real and what's not. You're bound to start thinking that you're a puppet in Plato's cave. And why not start to wonder if your dire enemy is the puppet-master and your entire life story is being told to you by that Democratic micro-dictaphone implanted in your cochlea?