The Sad and Silly Career Suicide of the Birther Lt. Col.

As reported at Oh For Goodness Sake, amongst other places - the Birthers are trying the court martial route to discovery, again. This time it's with someone who really should know better.

US Army Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, an active duty officer, intends to disobey a legal order to deploy to Afghanistan, because he decided a year and a half ago that his Commander in Chief was not his Commander in Chief. Sounds familiar. Capt. Connie Rhodes is in Iraq, where she did not want to go for that reason. Major Stefan Cook is out of a job with a DoD contractor, because he did not want to go to Afghanistan for the same reason. Both Rhodes v. MacDonald and Cook v. Good were tremendous losses for the Birther movement and hurt Obama not a whit. Hey! Let’s do it again.

He's got a web page, with an earnest, if somewhat halting, video statement:



Is this a legit arguement? If you take the Birther silliness out of the picture, then one has to wonder when one's loyalty to the office transcends loyalty to the man who sits in that office. Is this patriotism or treason? One could go back and forth.

But while this man may indeed be a patriot, he's basing a possibly-patriotic decision on a horrible delusion. He has clearly been sold a very insidious bill of intellectual goods by people who either should know better, or do but are chasing this "birther" scam down the rabbit hole for other, less seemly reasons.

It's very simple, folks. Obama has provided a digitized copy of his Certificate of Live Birth, which isall the proof that SHOULD BE NEEDED to show that he was born in Hawai'i, and is therefore a Natural Born Citizen, and therefore entitled to be President.

All other issues - his father's citizenship, his time in Indonesia, whether or not he was adopted by his step father, etc. - are just smoke screens that have been thrown up by very desperate people who are largely incompetent, grasping at straws, or rewriting history based on rumors and half-truths.

There is some insanity at work here, also some racism and islamophobia. But even the sane Birthers without hate in their hearts are still tilting at windmills, when they really should be dropping the issue like last week's fish. I don't know whether they just can't let it go because of pride or fear of looking foolish, but they only look even more foolish the more they drag this out.

So yes, this latest legal dog and pony show is just another sad and silly attempt for someone to claim that they're being directly affected by Obama being inelligible for his post, which would give them standing to sue, and allow them discovery, whereby they could go to Hawai'i and demand to see THE REAL THING.

And imagine their surprise when, upon receiving it, they discover it tells them exactly what Obama's been saying all along?

Me, I'll be laughing my tail off. So should we all.

But I'll be very sorry for this man, here, who will have thrown away a long and honorable career over nothing but fairy dust, sprinkled by dubious hands.