Birther Week in Review 5/14/11

in which the retrograde spin continues, Farah gears up for Tuesday's non-event, Orly gets told to mind her own business, Kreep makes good for once, Lakin's triumphant return from jail gets a crowdfail, and Missouri says "on second thought, don't show me" on the Birther Bill

It's the second week after the big reveal, and the scene has shifted quite a bit. While the number of affective Birthers (aka "People who hate Obama and were willing to believe any conspiracy theory about him until proven otherwise") has dwindled considerably (maybe), those who are still holding onto the ghost have begun spinning very intricate webs of half-truth, coincidence, and nonsense to buttress their beliefs.

At issue, currently, is the veracity of the Long Form Birth Certificate. As we mentioned last week, the presence of layers in the online graphic has caused some to claim that the certificate, itself, was bogus. The issue of the layers has been reasonably settled, but it has opened the floodgate to a number of other nitpicky and niggling issues that most likely have innocent explanations, but to the Birthers cry out "FRAUD."

Joseph "Mr. Mustache" Farah at World Net Daily (soon to be WND) is, perhaps not surprisingly, beating the Fraud drum the loudest, given that the new WND book, unfortunately entitled "Where's the Birth Certificate?" comes out this Tuesday. He has an entire laundry list of things that aren't right about it, according to him, but is ultimately falling back on the de vattelist (that is, irrelevant) conclusion that, due to only one of his parents being an American citizen at the time of his birth, President Obama is ineligible.

I was relatively certain Obama was hiding something, for instance, the real birth father. Because if Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was, in fact, his dad, then there is no way he is eligible to be president. He was a visiting student from Kenya, a subject of the United Kingdom. He conferred U.K. and Kenyan citizenship on his son at birth.

The men who wrote the Constitution and used the phrase "natural born citizen" as a requirement of office intended that future U.S. presidents would not have "divided loyalties" or even the appearance of "divided loyalties." In other words, the type of president they were trying to avoid with this language was the very type represented by Barack Obama.

That this is demonstrably not true has not deterred Farah and his happy tree friends at WND in the slightest, but it remains to be seen if Farah will only get shriller once the book comes out to what this correspondent suspects will be something of a dull thud to any outside the faithful.

Speaking of the faithful, Orly Taitz was at it again this week, trying to intervene in Hornbeck Offshore Services, L.L.C. v. Salazar et al As our friends at Oh For Goodness Sake note, the case is "related to the off-shore oil drilling moratorium and the Outer Continental Land Shelf Act, so Dr. Orly Taitz, Esq. figured, hey, why not? She traveled to New Orleans this morning to intervene."

What followed was no less than the Kaufmanesque legal comedy we've come to expect from the Birther Queen: misunderstood rules, irrelevant submissions, false facts, and even comedy props (an unsilenced cell phone)

Orly went first. She was trying to desperately, I think, in her argument, tie this to the Hornbeck case and tailor it to the case at hand and drilling. She stands up in her first argument and said, “Hornbeck is much more than a case on deep water drilling. It’s about the administration, the federal government,” and then she said something to the effect that the very foundations of the, or the legitimacy of the, government and all the actions it takes are riding on this.

About 90 seconds into the argument her cell phone went off, so she rushed back to the gallery area and got it out of her purse and stopped the ringing. The Court admonished her that she was not supposed to have a cell phone, and then Mr. Rosenblum said, “That’s another local rule.”

...

Then she pulled out her gigantic exhibit. She didn’t have an exhibit stand, so she stood, holding it, and tried to point, which forced her away from the microphone occasionally, so she could not be heard.

She begins pointing to this and doing basically the same argument she made to the Ninth Circuit. Obama has been using a selective draft registration that’s invalid, because it was an invalid Social Security number. And she went on for a couple of minutes about that, and then the Magistrate interrupted her again and then said, “Aren’t these the same things that you attached to your motion”?

“Yes,” she says.

He says, “I’ve already seen them.”

In the end, the comedy was for nothing. The very next day, Orly was told, in no uncertain terms, that her help was not needed here.

Considering the foregoing factors in this instance, this court must exercise its considerable discretion to deny intervention. I cannot conclude that the proposed intervention shares any common issue of law or fact with the main case. While the intervenor – like the original plaintiffs – asserts the invalidity of the moratorium action taken by defendants, the legal and factual basis of intervenor’s claim – i.e., the President’s place of birth or citizenship – is entirely different from the legal and factual assertions of the original claimants. ... For all of the foregoing reasons, the motion is DENIED. This intervention should not be permitted.

Orly is not very happy about this. No word on whether she's similarly unhappy that her rival Gary Kreep has succeeded where she's failed, time and again, and actually gotten a Birther case docketed at the Supreme Court.

Keyes’ attorney Gary Kreep argued that California Secretary of State Debra Bowen failed to meet her obligation to verify the eligibility of candidate Barack Obama to be President, and his right to appear on the California Ballot. California argued successfully that the California Secretary of State has no such statutory responsibility.

It will be interesting to see what the Supreme Court rules in this matter, but it will most likely fail to get Discovery on any documents that would make the Birthers happy. This is a question over procedure, not whether Obama, himself, was eligible or not.

Also not happy was the face of Birtherstan, as, contrary to its hopes and dreams, its favorite son LTC Terry Lakin was not greeted by a "couple of hundred people" when he came home, but merely by about 80.

(start rant)

Way to be there for your fallen hero, idiots. He loses everything on your behalf and you can't even rouse yourselves to get up to Baltimore to welcome him home? Fuck the lot of you. Really. I'm not making excuses for what he did and how he went about it, both of which were damned stupid, but he deserves better than this. Much better.

(end rant)

In fairness, I should point out that the photo above was actually a nice thing that his family did as a joke gift.

The story of the Fritos: A few days before Terry's release he had finally inventoried enough toilet paper and sundries after months to splurge $5 on a bag of Fritos. He kept it for three days and then one night just devoured the entire bag in a few minutes. The joy of a good junk food meal. So Jim and Peggy prepared a gift bag for him at the parking lot just for fun.

So no, he didn't just get a bag of corn chips as a reward. But the story was so touching in contrast to the crowdfail he got on his return, that I had to do something to stop myself from crying. So I made fun of it.

Make of that what you will.

And finally, in better news, the Birther portion of the Missouriomnibus election law reform bill bit the dust earlier this last week, when the language that would have required candidates to prove NBC status was removed.

The amendment was removed, along with several others, by a joint conference committee in hopes that the final bill can pass by the end of the legislative session on Friday. “The more amendments there are, the more likely it is to get hung up in the Senate,” said Sen. Kevin Engler, R-Farmington, who led the conference committee.

See you again next week, when we hope to have a look at "Where's the Birth Certificate."

In the meantime, remember: "Your face is gross, you eat white toast - You don't know what to do. - It's just your luck, you really suck - That's all - I'm sick of you!"