You have to understand, this was supposed to be WorldNetDaily’s moment. They’ve been pimping the birther issue all year, and today, on Barack Obama’s 48th birthday, they’re releasing a DVD that reveals everything.

Just as everyone is laughing at them.

And by everyone, we don’t mean the Usual Suspects like, um, us. We mean their fellow wingnuts, on Fox, at National Review, at Free Republic. The WND-promoted Orly Taitz certificate forgery was such a howler, everyone’s in on the gag.

Even Glenn Beck. “The birther thing, what are you going to do,” he told his radio audience Monday. “Even if it was true, what, are you going to take him out of office? You can’t do that.”

And just to twist the knife: “There’s so many things that are going on that are not on the fringes, not conspiratorial.”

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Well, this should get interesting — if it’s the kind of thing that interests you, as Keith Olbermann somewhat says on that Palin retrospective they’ve run on Countdown a half-dozen times.

If you watch Countdown (which we consider splendid West Coast dinner entertainment), you’ll recall that Keith declared a couple months back that he’ll no longer be lampooning Bill O’Reilly. The proximate cause was O’Reilly’s advocacy of physician executions. But by a curious coincidence, according to the New York Times, the ceasefire happened just after NBC’s Jeff Zucker and one of Rupert Murdoch’s henchmen negotiated a truce between their warring cable networks.

A truce brokered by — wait for it — Charlie Rose.

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We wish we could be all witty about the Beer Summit, but six months into the Obama Presidency, we fear that something ugly has emerged from the rock it’s been hiding under. It’s Jeff Sessions calling Sonia Sotomayor a racist. It’s Glenn Beck calling Obama a racist. It’s people in positions of authority and influence not calling them on it, for fear of — what? Disturbing the peace?

Have you seen the face of hate? Happily, we haven’t, not personally — only in pictures we grew up with, as a child in the Sixties and a teenager in the Seventies. Iconic images, many of moments we literally lived through, but seemed a distant past by the time we came to consciousness.

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Think Progress, Wednesday, 8:45 p.m.:

A comprehensive analysis of Palin’s last two months of Twitter updates (May 26-July 26) reveals…

Please. We beg you. Before you hurt yourself, or those around you. For the love of humanity, of furry critters, of bad DVDs with your loved ones, of flat orange soda, of three-ply toilet paper, of cold pizza, of satellite rugby, of Mingus and Dolphy, of all that is holy in the world and incapable of mortal debasement:

Get help.

A Statistical Analysis Of Policy Trends And Abnormalities In Sarah Palin’s Tweets [Think Progress]

The Birther story may be dead, but as we Exclusively! reported Monday, the afterlife of that story is gaining steam: the fight among wingnut poobahs whether to take it seriously, and the recriminations against those who don’t.

Our first round involved reputed human Ann Coulter, who in the company of Geraldo Rivera and Mike Huckabee on Fox News, shot down the story so decisively that the first-year government quota of croaking seniors was met that day. WorldNetDaily, official scorekeeper of the Afterbirthers, immediately posted a reader poll questioning her right to exist.

Comes now word of even bigger game afoot: Bill O’Reilly, defending Lou Dobbs’ right to bloviate, called the Birther issue itself “bogus” and “patently absurd”.

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We really didn’t want to get involved with the Skip Gates mess because, well, it wasn’t a mess. In fact, if you set your Crayolas aside, it’s very straightforward: neighbor suspects guy of breaking into his own house, calls the police, who visit the guy, who gets somewhat pissed that he’s suspected of breaking into his own house, so the police haul him in for talking back at them on his own porch.

Even wingnuts should understand that one. Heck, place it in Texas, and they’d be ranting about the government harassing godfearing homeowners, and blaming President Mombasa for not doing anything about it.

But it does involve Crayolas, and it happened in Commiebridge, Massachusetts, and the Reality Inversion that is 2009 continues apace.

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First, an Apology to Our Readers: the post that follows does no justice whatsoever to the most brilliant headline we’ve written all year. But we had the post first, and we don’t have time to go back and pull an Area Man out of our ass. It’s not like we get paid for this.

So, while you’re imagining a hiliarious fantasy post* involving WorldNetDaily’s discovery of a notarized placenta in the possession of Barack Obama’s step-grandmother in Kenya, let’s move on to the mundane subject that triggered our awesome inspiration: the afterlife of the Birther Meme.

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