The country, by now, is well-acquainted with “birthers”: those individuals that insist on bucking reality in favor of a conservative-spun narrative in which Barack Obama was born in Kenya or even Indonesia. Obama’s campaign produced his birth certificate in 2008, proof of his birth in Honolulu, Hawaii. Now, with the 2012 presidential race heating up, some in the potential field of GOP candidates (and it would take a field to accommodate them all) are attempting to dust off the old tactics, including the “birther conspiracy”.

            Mike Huckabee, a front-runner for the 2008 Republican nomination and current Fox News pundit, resurrected the birther argument publicly on a radio interview in February. He accused Obama of growing up in Kenya, “hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists that persecuted his grandfather.” He accused Obama of being born in Kenya, but then implied that the President was possessed of some “anti-colonialist” mentality as if it had some bearing on his economic policies. However, in a speech to the National Press Club days before his interview, the Huckster admonished birthers, saying he found it useless to debate the President’s religion and nation of origin. “I know with some people it’s an obsession. It is not with me.” This according to Politifact.com.

            Well, if Huckabee wouldn’t come out definitively on one side or another, Donald Trump certainly would. On April 7^th, Trump ran the NBC media circuit, stopping by both MSNBC and the Today Show to discuss his possible presidential bid in 2012. Trump talked extensively about his suspicions about President Obama’s nation of birth, holding up tired old arguments. He spent several minutes attempting to explain the semantics behind a “certificate of live birth” versus a “birth certificate”. Trump continued, Meredith Vieira staring on in stunned silence, attempting to breath life into the old argument that Obama’s Kenyan step-grandmother was present at his birth, a cut-and-paste sound-bite so childish that it was discredited back in 2008, when it didn’t work the first time.

            Ironically, the only person in the NBC media lineup that morning to call Trump out on his delusions was another guest: Bill Cosby. Describing Donald Trump as “full of it”, he managed to dismiss the entire tirade within seconds and return the news program to some semblance of “normal” (though it might be argued that no morning news show even approaches normal).

            Tim Pawlenty has already written off the birther debate (how does one debate a delusion?) referring to it as, “not an issue we should be raising” on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”. That doesn’t mean he’s not above cracking a joke about it at a Tea Party summit in Arizona, and again at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. He quipped, according to the New York Times, that he’s “not one who questions the existence of the president's birth certificate, but when you listen to his policies, don't you at least wonder what planet he's from?”

            If these instances of b.s. (birther syndrome) by Republican presidential hopefuls is an indication of the kind of tactics we’ll see in the 2012 presidential race, we can assume the Grand Ole Partisans and their Tea party affiliates will be singing the same old song: if you can’t out-politic a politician, try to discredit him. The problem is, they can’t. Someone once told me that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over, hoping for a different outcome.” If this truly is a sign of things to come, the rest of the country can breath a sigh of relief and settle back for the show.