Silly me. Here I had been thinking that the wild-eyed foamers at the mouth who were driven nearly to madness by the prospect of Barack Obama's election to the presidency were going to wait until Obama actually did something to offend them before going nuts again.



But no.



Those who spent most of the 1990s seething that Bill and Hillary Clinton were serial murderers and who devoted the entire 2008 campaign cycle to painting Obama as a mysterious radical aren't relaxing during the transition.



Much of their energy these days is devoted to the effort to block Obama from assuming the presidency on the grounds that he's not a "natural-born citizen" of the United States, as the Constitution requires.



Their hopes rest on several false and farfetched propositions. And they rely, in the end, on either the Supreme Court or Congress being willing to create political chaos during already very frightening and perilous times based on various idiosyncratic interpretations of constitutional language and other statutes.



The Tribune has explained the error of their ways in several stories, and after I added an approving "me too" at Change of Subject last week, I was flooded with furious and patronizing e-mail from all over the country.



Many of these zealots claim to be mere defenders of the Constitution. But poke them, as I did in some instances, and out rushes the gassy blast of Bill-Ayers-Reverend-Wright-Tony-Rezko-Rashid-Khalidi-Occidental-College-Records and other points of concern that did not, to their dismay, turn the electorate against Obama.



Their little crusade won't go anywhere. But to them that will mean only that the Supreme Court has joined the mainstream media and perhaps Congress in a great conspiracy to put a foreignlike man in the White House to launch a Marxist revolution with the help of his terrorist friends.



For four years, maybe eight, we'll be hearing their shrill, tedious accusations, their daffy theories rooted in parsing and paranoia. Up until the day Obama's successor is sworn in we'll be hearing about his middle name—it's Hussein, have you heard?—and why he shouldn't be counted as fully American.



I wish we had the luxury to be amused.