Mary Katharine does the honors but this post was bound to emerge somewhere in the blogosphere sooner or later. Like Kaus says, it’s fish in a barrel. The only person who won’t grasp the irony and hypocrisy instantly is Sullivan himself, who used to have as his tagline this line from Orwell: “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Little did he know how constant.

It doesn’t happen terribly often, but I’m with Andrew Sullivan on the need to lay Obama birther-ism to rest— a subject on which he’s been blogging with some energy over the last day.

Indeed, it’s almost as if birthers have allowed an intense and sometimes irrational dislike of a political figure to lead them to conspiracy theories while rationalizing the indulgence with concerns about the vetting process and rants about the failed responsibilities of a complicit media. It’s almost like they continue to ignore evidence to the contrary of such theories in order to preserve their favored narrative long after the question (and election) is settled, even when induced to abandon it by friends, adversaries, and Occam’s Razor alike.

My only knock on MK is that she limits herself to Sully’s Trig-related conspiracy theories. In fact, his nuttiness goes way beyond that, or at least it did before I quit reading him two years ago. See this post from May 2007 for a few of his greatest anti-“neocon” hits. That was occasioned by him having the gall to accuse Michelle of 9/11 Trutherism, yet another instance of his bizarre blind spot to his own paranoia leaving him exposed as a hypocrite. Ed’s catalogued other examples. Oh, and he’s evidently still a believer in Trig Truth even though he now apparently claims to be agnostic about it: See Ace’s latest for details of that. Exit question from that post: He’s not seriously onto Willow as the prime suspect in Trig’s mysterious birth, is he?