Obama Birth Certificate Kooks In Court
Mike Madden chronicles in Salon a day spent watching the people who believe President-Elect Barack Obama isn't a natural born citizen because of gamma rays emanating from internet porn. It's a story to be delighted in and savored. It's the incredibly true tale of "dentist-slash-lawyers" and manic-depression and multiple violations of Godwin's Law and the "press conference" they held at the National Press Club.
I mean, this is straight bonkers, y'all:
Throughout the press conference, the conspiracy theorists had trouble keeping things focused. Harlem minister James David Manning wandered off on a tangent about how Obama's election still means "there's never been a black womb" that produced a president. Manning might have seemed like he was making a case against Obama based on some theory of black nationalism, except that he admitted he had endorsed John McCain in the campaign. That was after he had called Obama "this usurper, this long-legged mack daddy."
Taitz -- the lead attorney in the case the Supreme Court declined to hear Monday morning -- kept making stranger and stranger assertions. At one point, she asked why the government had fined broadcasters for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," but didn't intervene to force the media to report on Obama's allegedly phony birth certificate. She claimed Obama holds passports from at least four countries, compared him to Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, equated the "controversy" about Obama to Watergate, and finished her tour-de-force presentation by saying that if Obama can claim he's a U.S. citizen and win an election, then so could just about anyone. "If a person can become a presidential candidate only based on his own statement," she said, "then somebody like Osama bin Laden, theoretically, can come and write a statement, 'I'm eligible,' and we should put him on the ballot, too?"
I also appreciate that Madden is kind enough to throw in a little News You Can Use about how the mentally ill are always using the National Press Club as a venue to validate their lunatic night terrors:
It was clear from the occasional applause that most of the people in the room agreed with Schultz, anyway. Although the event was at the National Press Club, that's no guarantee of mainstream media interest. Groups may appear legitimate because they hold a news conference at the club, but the dirty little secret is the club rents out its rooms to anybody who shows up with the money. Most of the people apparently came from the weirder corners of the media. One friendly questioner, Shelli Baker of Morning Song Radio, wound up taking the mike for about 10 minutes to tell a complicated story involving Saudi oil barons, John Ashcroft, sharia law, the World Bank and Mitt Romney, which left even Schultz confused.
If you recall, the National Press Club is where the unbalanced Larry Sinclair held his own "stupefying press conference." Anyway, Madden says the conspiracy twits have "another lawsuit up [their] sleeve," so, there's no reason that any of this ever has to end.
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First Posted: 12- 9-08 01:58 PM | Updated: 01- 9-09 05:12 AM