Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 12:27 am
Yesterday I wrote an article about the “skeet birther” movement sweeping the right wing paranoiacs, only to be regaled with tall tales explaining in no uncertain terms that the President is so busted. He never went skeet shooting, the picture is a lie! If only I would take off my Obama blindfold, I would see the truth.
As the right wing media jumped around like frogs from lily pad to lily pad, desperately hoping to land on The Accusation That Stuck, they screeched that the gun angle was wrong, the gun was wrong, the smoke angle was suspicious, the President threatened them not to photoshop the picture, “questions must be asked”, etc.
Then the Holy Grail of Skeet Birthers: The President could not have been skeet shooting on that fateful day in August, in spite of the picture provided by the White House. You see, he was golfing that day.
This gem was tweeted by a very confused Right winger, aptly self-named CrazyBullet2012, who is currently working on proving that the President can’t skeet shoot AND golf on the same day:
Over at Breitbart (the place for crazy memes that will soon infiltrate Fox News), they’re teeming with paranoia because the time stamp on the skeet picture is set to PST.
One Breitbart writer embarked on Skeet Gate with great solemnity as if it were WaterGate itself, while allegedly attempting to calm down the skeet birthers — “CTFO” he urges his nervous cult. (There’s a job waiting for him as a factchecker at the Washington Post, no doubt.) However, much investigation is required:
So I went back over to the photo’s metadata page to get a screenshot, and I realized this time that it also included the time as well as the date. Great! I’ll make my case that much more cleanly—
“Taken on August 4, 2012 7:19 PM PST.”
No. That cannot be right. Can it?
So that’s 10:19 PM eastern. Sundown that day was 8:16 PM eastern.
Well, can’t tweet that. It’ll just drive everyone even more bananas.
Right, much better to write that so that all of your readers can file it away in their He’s Coming for Us file. No worries, patriots, the Breitbart writer has, in fact, reached out to Pete Souza, White House photographer, to confirm that his camera was set to the wrong time zone. I’m sure Souza will get right on it, unless his bat phone is set to avoid the crazy galaxy.
The world awaits the results of the time zone stamp drama!
All of this energy expended in an attempt to debunk a photo of the President skeet shooting seems absurd. It is absurd. It’s happening because conservatives refused to believe the President when he said he went skeet shooting, so when faced with evidence that they were wrong, they do what agenda-ridden paranoiacs do: They double down. They are going this far down the rabbit hole only to prove that the President does not skeet shoot.
Let that soak in.
What would it mean to them if the President did skeet shoot (as he obviously has)? What world view would this puncture that is so precarious it can’t allow a moment of reality to violate its dark, dank dungeon?
Well, you see, if they admit this, then the entire house of cards might tumble down. They might be permitted, then, to admit that it was Mitt Romney who restricted gun rights, while Obama expanded them. They might have to admit that Ronald Reagan restricted gun rights, that the Republican National Convention refused to allow even toy guns into its hall, and that Sarah Palin disarmed an Alaska militia.
But these facts fly in the face of their entire world view — a world view based on deliberate lies fed to them by the money machine behind right wing paranoia, in which a fictional President Obama is the boogeyman of their nightmares. So these poor suckers can’t be allowed to see the truth, even for a moment. Instead, they must double down on the crazy.
These are the same people who think that the Sandy Hook massacre was a set up by the President. Some of them don’t believe that the children are really dead. One of them heckled a parent of a murdered child. Judging from their behavior, we get the idea that they are, quite frankly, very ill.
This concludes today’s foray into the jungle that is a right wing conspiracy theorist’s mind. Do not try this without a sense of humor, because if you really absorb the chronic level of brainwashing of which millions of right leaning citizens are victims, it will both sadden and alarm you.
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
Connect with Sarah on Post, Mastodon @PoliticusSarah@Journa.Host, & Twitter.
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