Let me finish tonight with the grassy knoll. That was the place in Dallas - near the Texas Book Depository - that the crazies believe people shot at President Kennedy.
To the conspiracist mind, it's important to "always" have a grassy knoll. It is their grotto of denial, a place to travel mentally and find deliverance from reality. Those who don't like reality need a grassy knoll to get through the night.
I do not wish to do injustice to these desperadoes. I know exactly why people need "grassy knolls." They need them because they cannot bear the suffering that truth brings to the heart and mind.
How could some loser - some misfit who went to the Soviet Union because he thought he liked communism and believed he could find a happy life there, then came home and fell hard for Fidel Castro on the rebound, how could this "squirt" kill the regal Jack Kennedy? It doesn't balance out? How could a nobody kill such a great somebody?
Worse yet, how could a man of the hard left - a communist - kill Jack Kennedy? Why wasn't it a right-winger who killed him? Then we could blame it on them? I've got it! We'll come up with a conspiracy theory - don't actually have to prove anything - that says it - get this! - it really was a right-winger! It's that guy or those guys in the "grassy knoll." Don't you get it! It was the right-wing that killed our hero.
A half century later, we've got a new "grassy knoll," another place of retreat for those who can't stand a hard truth. The truth is that Barack Obama is president of the United States. Got it! President of the United States, duly elected leader of the country living right there in the White House.
And they … can't … stand … it. They can't stand that is, in fact, a fact. No way around it. No way. Just look at the history books. Look at the newspaper. Dang it! This guy "is" president. He was elected president. A majority of the people wanted him president and went out and voted for him.
How do we change "that" reality?
I got it, with "this …." It didn't happen. You see, he wasn''t born here. He's not eligible to be president. I read it somewhere the he's from somewhere else. Can't put my figure on it but he's not really an American, you see! Not natural born, anywhere. He's from out there somewhere.
And so last night, the boobs in the Arizona legislature voted to require that candidates for president produce other documents beside the official document the state of Hawaii issues as a birth certificate. They want circumcision, baptismal records. They want something nobody's ever wanted before from any candidate before.
What they really want is the same thing the grassy knoll people want even now - deliverance from the truth they cannot handle.
Donald Trump! Take a bow for giving new hope to grassy knollers everywhere.