If you ever needed hard evidence to support my claim that when it comes to right-wing insanity, there’s no such thing as too far, I present to you an in-depth look at the mind of lead birther Orly Taitz. To use some of Will’s phrase-ology, she is pure “government listening to me through my fillings” crazy.

I’d like to quote some statements, but here’s the fly-by: Salon writer Gabriel Winant talked to Taitz via Skype and let her crazy flow for hours, unfettered. The list of what she believes, some said explicitly and others given in the sort of “well I can’t prove otherwise…” manner that also implicates Taitz herself in the 1996 Olympic bombings (prove she didn’t), is mindblowing. To put it mildly.

• Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate is a fake.
• It’s Barry Soetoro, not Barack Obama.
• The president has dozens of Social Security numbers.
• FactCheck.org is not to be trusted.
• The Annenberg Challenge program for Chicago schools, for which Obama sat on the board, saw hundreds of millions of dollars mysteriously frittered away.
• Obama’s campaign was guilty of widespread intimidation of Hillary Clinton supporters in the Democratic primaries, perhaps in addition to vote fraud through dead voters.
• Google is in on all of this.
• Hundreds of servicemen are getting sick from mysterious vaccinations.
• The flu vaccine is contaminated.
• Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez may have been rigging our elections.

For a moment I’d like to remind you all just who Orly Taitz is. Dentist, real estate agent, and sort of lawyer, this Moldovian living in California might have been just another inconsequential member of society, but then she latched onto the “Obama is not a citizen” crazy train and, through her dogged determination to ignore both reason and reality, was catapulted to national prominence.

Not just prominence amongst the fringe, either. She’s been on MSNBC, on CNN, and even landed on the less-than-reputable Savage Nation. Along the way she’s been featured in TIME, landed on Politico for talking about what Republicans are Facebook friends with her, and this Salon article, amongst others.

Yes, a large part of that has been in derision, but it’s been a level of exposure not often granted to conspiracy theorists. Quick, name anyone who championed the 9/11 Truth Movement or the 2004 Ohio Diebold fiasco, and no fair googling it first. Nothing?

Okay, let’s shift back some. Before Taitz we had another right-wing maniac du jour: Jerome Corsi. Remember him? He was the guy that wrote the amazingly fact-free book that supposedly detailed Obama’s ties to terrorists and radical Islam. Despite that most of the book could be corrected with the most cursory research, FOX was more than happy to legitimize the man and have Sean Hannity interview him without challenging him in the slightest. He’s a writer on two high-profile, if not respectable, websites (WorldNetDaily and Human Events). Two of his books have been best-sellers.

Oh yeah, two. Corsi showed up a few years before the 2008 election; 2004 to be precise. This time around he was the main man hocking the lie that John Kerry was lying about his medals and military service. As co-author of Unfit for Command with one John O’Neill, he produced a second fact-free book, largely based on interviews with people who weren’t present at any of the events they talked about. This spawned the entire “Swiftboat” movement, a period of political hatchet-work that’s now become synonymous with dishonest and vicious lies launched against a candidate.

Swiftboaters were given amazing credibility through the mainstream media, eating up much of the late 2004 season, showing up in calm interviews with Ted Koppel, and being at the forefront of much of the discussion on John Kerry, leading to one hilarious exchange between Chris Matthews and Michelle Malkin where Tweety slaughtered Malkin for trying to say-without-saying-it that Kerry had shot himself to get a Purple Heart, the kind of nutjob conspiracy theory that would never fly coming from a liberal. Consider how few people came out to make any untoward comments about John McCain’s time in Vietnam, and that Dan Rather was fired for reporting on a falsehood. Corsi and Malkin? Still kicking around.

We can go back even further, actually. Back during the waning years of the Clinton presidency, the number of insane theories around him grew with each passing day. He murdered Vince Foster, he murdered Ron Brown, he raped Juanita Broaddrick. Each story crazier than the last, each one showing up in dozens, if not hundreds, of mainstream publications as possibly true stories. The Bush theories? Untouchable, and certainly never given legitimacy by any respectable news outlet.

No matter how crazy, how unbelievable, or how unsupported a right-wing mouthpiece’s statements are, they’re given at least one news cycle where serious reports seriously report on the serious issue with the utmost seriosity. The accusation, when it comes from the right, is enough to make it land on the front page.

Again, you won’t find a flipside to this. Voices accusing Bush of conspiring to steal votes in 2004 weren’t broadcast into American homes on the mainstream news, you never saw an even-handed discussion about the accusations in Loose Change, and not a single Congressman will come out and say that European-style health care is a good idea. Ever heard of Vincent Bugliosi? He wrote a book called The Prosecution of George W Bush for Murder. That was a best-seller, but he was blacked out from the mainstream media beyond book reviews. Neither he nor the charges he leveled were on the evening news day after day after day.

So we get an artificial spectrum, where the farthest left voices given any spotlight are center-left liberals who shy away from even Michael Moore (a strong liberal but hardly a Taitz-level maniac), and the farthest right are lunatics like Beck who weeps that liberals are going to destroy democracy and Dobbs that accuse Obama of being an immigrant, which pulls the whole frame of debate towards the right, even as the population shifts left. Is there a fix? I don’t know, but it’s making it very, very hard to keep watching the news.

Sorry for harping on something I talk about a lot, but it just hit me over the head like a damn sledgehammer.