Politico.com "Culture of Conspiracy: The Birthers

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The conspiracy theorists have an odd name which sounds more like a group of mothers in Maturnity Wards then a political movement, described by Politico.com as a "fringe groip". They're also turning out to be an embarassment to conservative Republicans. The full article can be found here with excerpts below. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/19450.html [i]Bill Clinton had the Vince Foster "murder." George W. Bush had 9/11 Truth. And the new administration has brought with it a new culture of conspiracy: The Birthers. Out of the gaze of the mainstream and even the conservative media is a flourishing culture of advocates, theorists and lawyers, all devoted to proving that Barack Obama isn't eligible to be president of the United States. Viewed as irrelevant by the White House, and as embarrassing by much of the Republican Party, the subculture still thrives from the conservative website WorldNetDaily, which claims that some 300,000 people have signed a petition demanding more information on Obama's birth, to Cullman, Alabama, where Sen. Richard Shelby took a question on the subject at a town hall meeting last week. Their confinement to the fringe hasn't cooled the passion of believers; the obscure New York preacher James Manning turned up at a National Press Club session in December to declare the president "the most notorious criminal in the history not just of America, but of this entire planet." A quick reality check, before we dive in: The challenges to Obama's eligibility have no grounding in evidence. Courts across the country have summarily rejected the movement's theory — that Obama can't be a citizen because his father wasn't —as a misreading of U.S. law; and Hawaii officials, along with contemporary birth announcements, affirm that Obama was in fact born in Honolulu in 1961. But belief in obscure, discredited theories is a constant in a country with a history of partisan division — a country in which, a recent survey showed, 34 percent of the public believes in UFOs and 24 percent believes in witches.. .... The conservative talk show host Michael Medved recently referred to the movement's leaders as "crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative imposters" who are "the worst enemy of the conservative movement." "It makes us look weird. It makes us look crazy. It makes us look demented. It makes us look sick, troubled, and not suitable for civilized company," he mourned. .... The White House is, presently, ignoring the birth certificate questions, having released an official copy of the Hawaii certificate during the presidential campaign. The press aide once tasked with quashing viral rumors, Ben LaBolt, no longer follows the fringe. But lawyers for the Democratic National Committee and for Obama have been steadily batting down a stream of lawsuits, winning motions to dismiss the suits in courts from Pennsylvania to Hawaii, from the state level to the United States Supreme Court. To believers, the legal engagement itself is evidence that something's afoot. "[Obama] is spending hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to keep this information from getting out," said Gary Kreep, the lawyer representing former presidential candidate Alan Keyes, who sued Obama in California to prevent the state from certifying its election results. Keyes recently called the citizenship issue "the greatest crisis this nation has ever seen" and warned of "chaos, confusion and civil war." Kreep has been battling Obama's California lawyer, Fredric Woocher, to release the president's records from Occidental College on the theory that they might provide information about his citizenship. Woocher has threatened to seek sanctions against Kreep for pursuing the case. "This suit, like all of the others that have been filed challenging Obama's qualifications for the Presidency, is frivolous," he said in an email to POLITICO, adding that he is, in fact, working pro bono. "There is absolutely no truth to the stories about the untold millions supposedly being paid to us," he said. Most of the lawsuits seek documents and express dissatisfaction with the State of Hawaii's refusal to release for public inspection Obama's original birth certificate rather than the notarized copy typically issued. The state's governor, Linda Lingle, has attested to the authenticity of the birth certificate, and Hawaii law forbids its release; Kreep blamed Democratic control of Hawaii for the refusal to release it. (Lingle is a Republican.)[/i]