Taxonomy of Deatherism

Since President Obama's announcement on Sunday that the United States had found and killed Usama Bin Laden, a new conspiracy has erupted. Call it Deatherism, the basic tenet is that President Obama was not responsible for the death of Usama Bin Laden. As with Birtherism, the perisistent and demonstrably false ideology holding that President Obama is not a natural born American Citizen, Deatherism has many taxonomical groups that seem to be appearing.

Many of the same American conservative figures who have played a roll in spreading the Birther Cause are involved here. Rupert Murdoch, Pamela Geller, World Net Daily, et al. just want to embarrass President Obama. This time, they are joined by supporters of Al Qaeda and violent anti-American extremists who are hoping to discredit the American forces and the country as a whole after a visible and stunning victory in the war on terror. The Death Eater taxonomy has three main kingdoms.

There is the rejectionist approach, which appeals mostly to foreign anti-American sentiment and the less credible domestic Anti-Obama sentiment. Rejectinist Deatherism involves the belief that Usama Bin Laden is still alive, somewhere, likely chilling with Biggie, Tupac, and Elvis. This strain has the added attraction of calling the President a liar, which seems to be the ideology underlying Birtherism as well. The more strenuously the President provides evidence for a point, the less likely Republicans are likely to believe it. The Rejectionist Death Eaters: the Pakistani Taliban and Free Republic bloggers.

A second kingdom, Dithering Deatherism, takes as granted that President Obama is too weak or indecisive to order the high-risk raid on Usama Bin Laden's compound in the heart of a Pakistani suburb dominated by the nation's military elite. The Daily Mail, a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece, decries the decision timeline "16 hours" they scream, as if the decision should be easier (or as if it were time sensitive-Usama Bin Laden hadn't left the compound since at least August). Pamela Geller takes the Dithering Deatherism logic to absurdist lengths, claiming that President Obama didn't actually order Bin Laden killed. This theory posits that a military coup occured, forcing the President from the position of Commander-in-Chief.

A secret military coup in order to kill Bin Laden is pretty unlikely, but one Dithering Death Eater makes a testable claim:

This situation continued for some time, though the division between Jarrett/Obama and the rest intensified more recently, most notably from Hillary Clinton. She was livid over the president’s failure to act, and her office began a campaign of anonymous leaks to the media indicating such.

Death Eaters believe that "anonymous leaks" were going to the media that the U.S. knew where Bin Laden was, but wasn't acting. This would be a bombshell story, and if any media outlet got a hold of it, there would have been a firestorm of coverage. Check google: no firestorm about Bin Laden before Sunday night? No story. The claim is laughably false, possibly satire.br />
The last kingdom in the Death Eater taxonomy I've seen is Controlled Release Deatherism. These theories include that Bin Laden has been dead for ten years, possibly in cold storage. Another strain has it that Pakistani authorities had previously captured Bin Laden and were keeping quiet about it for some unexplained reason. An initial variant simply held that the raid had been carried out a week before, pretending that the media hype on Sunday night was purely manufactured by the White House, and not a result of the tempo of the raid and subsequent verification of Bin Laden's identity. In any event, Controlled Release Death Eaters believe the JSOC raid was faked, maybe even more faked than the moon landing.

Conservative paranoids (and the violent extremist sympathizers who also share these theories) may never get to the bottom of Usama Bin Laden's death. More power to them for asking the tough, eminently absurd questions.