Dr. Orly Taitz, one of the lawyers tying up various courtrooms with half-baked theories about President Obama’s citizenship, made an appearance on MSNBC yesterday afternoon that I feel confident is the worst television appearance I’ve ever seen.
Her paranoid behavior began with anticipatory accusations that the hosts would not give her enough time to speak. It only went downhill from there, culminating in her threat later in the segment that Tamryn Hall will be removed from television. If this spectacle disabuses even one birther of the fantasy that Obama is anything but a natural-born American, then the attention was probably worth it. Unfortunately, it also works to the president’s advantage.
It has been a big week for “Birthers,” who seem to be getting way, way more attention than they should, and way more than the so-called 9/11 “Truthers” ever did. Their fruitless and factless inquiries into Obama’s origins, grounded in credulity and imprecise concepts of law obtained over the Internet, work to the president’s advantage by distracting from the bevy of damaging new government programs he is in the middle of implementing — health care, cap and trade, and forcing taxpayers to fund the wanton destruction of perfectly good automobiles, for example.
This week, the excuse for giving the birthers some attention is an obviously fake Kenyan birth certificate which, like the legal thinking behind the birther movement, was cooked up by some guy on the Internet. The document was supposedly signed by a clerk in the Coastal Province of the Republic of Kenya several months before the Republic of Kenya formally existed. And that clerk shares the name of an environmentally friendly soap sold in stores today, “E.F. Lavender.” People thought Dan Rather was gullible.
No one would ever have believed in this document’s authenticity for even one second, except that certain people are emotionally invested and desperate to believe that Obama is not a natural-born citizen. They want to believe that he is not really the president, just as some supporters of John Kerry wanted to believe that George W. Bush’s 120,000-vote re-elect margin in Ohio would be overturned, just as some liberals wanted to believe in the authenticity of the so-called Rathergate documents in 2004 and even later.
Obama has produced a perfectly good, legal birth certificate with which he could obtain a passport or a driver’s license. And if he ever shows up on television with the so-called “long-form” birth certificate in which so many anonymous Internet posters have suddenly become lifelong experts, it will not stop the conspiracy theorists anyway. They will continue to argue, as some do even now, that Obama lost whatever American citizenship he might have had when he moved to Indonesia and was adopted by his step-father. Or even, as some already write online in disregard of all U.S. law and custom, that Obama cannot be a citizen anyway, because his father was not a citizen.
