A Longish Story Here

If you spend as much time reading and commenting on political blogs as I do, you know that one of the backgrounder issues burning out in the right-wingnut-o-sphere is high intensity scrutiny of Barack Obama's birth certificate for some proof that he isn't really a citizen of the United States.

If you didn't know about this, congratulations, you have a normal life and don't find yourself devoting far too much brain matter to the obsessions of fools.

Apparently, still huffing the fumes of the high the wingnuts gave themselves after the Dan Rather Memogate business, they are still bulging their eyes and screaming about font kerning.

No, really.

I'm not bullshitting you here.

It's a fairly hilarious business watching inchoate rage at the lot the political life has dealt these suckas, it's completely unlikely to ever be taken seriously except by the kinds of people who get most of their news from email forwards, and it keeps the nuts occupied with something rather than off stalking children, as is their wont. The downside of this is that it's so completely obvious to anyone that what this is all about is the fact that Obama is – shhhhhh – black.

Now, to back up for a second (and if you like, skip all this text and go straight down to the graphic, because that's where all the good stuff really is), I first started reading political blogs around the 2000 election debacle down in Florida. Hungry for news, I regularly visited the website of Salon where Josh Marshall had a fine little column that turned up now and again. At the bottom of one of his columns was some standard boiler plate stuff about who he was, but included in it was a link to his website TalkingPointsMemo.com.

So I went there. And started reading it regularly. Then one day, Josh had a blog item that said something like "Atrios is right when he says..." which linked to Eschaton, the website of Atrios. Now he was the heavy hitter in the day until Daily Kos came along, but from that one link, I went everywhere in the then-birthing left wing blogosphere. To TBogg and his bassets (RIP Satchmo) to Roger Ailes (the good one) to Kevin Drum back when he was Calpundit to the Poor Man and a million others laboring out there in obscurity.

One regular link from Atrios was to Jesse Taylor who ran Pandagon. Jesse Taylor was The Man and his blog posts were almost universally hilarious. When he left to start work for the Ohio Democrats, he left the blog in good hands, but it was never quite the same.

This election has seen his return to blogging and it has been so hugely welcome. You forget sometimes how much you miss someone unitl they return.

I got that feeling totally when he put out this gem of a post featuring the document you see below, the 1000% completely true and accurate birth certificate of Obama, blowing open the whole election.


Damn, it's good to have you back, Jesse.