SHORTER OLE PERFESSER INSTAPUNDIT: I'M NOT NUTS, YOU'RE NUTS!

Behold Glenn Harlan Reynolds' evidentiary standards: At USA Today, he deduces a level of PR damage to the government due to the IRS "scandal" (i.e., the taxmen having the nerve to review Tea Party claims that they weren't political organizations) from the findings of "a tax symposium at Pepperdine Law School." Then he speculates that this directly affects how the American People think about the NSA revelations, which apparently would have been perfectly acceptable to them otherwise. (Of course the large number of commentators who switched from pro-surveillance to anti-surveillance around January 20, 2009 would have had nothing to do with it.) Then:

Spend a little while on Twitter or in Internet comment sections and you'll see a significant number of people who think that the NSA may have been relaying intelligence about the Mitt Romney campaign to Obama operatives, or that Chief Justice John Roberts' sudden about-face in the Obamacare case might have been driven by some sort of NSA-facilitated blackmail.

Unfortunately there's no way to compare this "significant number of people" to the percentage of the population who believe in flying saucers, but I'll bet it's roughly equivalent.

A year ago, these kinds of comments would have been dismissable as paranoid conspiracy theory.

And to normal people they still are. But normal people are not the Perfesser's audience:

But now, while I still don't think they're true, they're no longer obviously crazy. And that's Obama's legacy: a government that makes paranoid conspiracy theories seem possibly sane.

To recap, some people believe crazy shit because Obama has made it believable, and the proof is the crazy shit some people have believed all along. It's a perfect loop of bullshit. Like Salieri with the mediocrities at the end of Amadeus, the Perfesser is absolving the wingnuts.  Did you believe in birtherism? The Whitey Tape? The Hillary Clinton constitutional crisis? That Sarkozy called Obama nuts? That Obama campaign workers beat up Ashley Todd? That Obama apologized for World War II? Wrote a treasonous college thesis? Wanted to make veterans kill themselves? Bill Ayers wrote his book? That he's a Mooslim, or a Muslin? Or a Socialist? And/or a Fascist (indeed, Hitler)? Whatever total nonsense you peddled, it's okay -- because Obama. Now, on to the next wave of hearings over the people the Kenyan Pretender murdered at Benghazi!