Weigel

Undead Birtherism

Things could be worse for Barack Obama on this, the day before the 50th anniversary of his birth. After being goaded and goaded and goaded over three years, he released his long-form birth certificate. Birtherism as we once knew it is dead. Sort of. One reason birtherism survived as long as it did is that it was such a cash cow for fringe right activists. WorldNetDaily schlepped some untold amount of “Where’s the Birth Certificate” merch, promoting it all with news stories on its website. How are they living after birtherism died? Oh. wndbumper While the rest of us moved on, WND just redesigned the WTBC merch and slapped an extra word on it. The merchandise accompanies fresh stories on WND’s site, including one that attempts to prove that the long-form is fake because “no expert has been able to replicate the effects seen in the Obama birth certificate PDF by scanning a document, even with OCR software switched on and the resulting PDF optimized.” Some more time with WND’s new birtherism trove leads us to revelations like this one:

Retired Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely, the chief of Stand Up America, a national security expert and Fox News contributor, says the “Certificate of Live Birth” released in April by the White House is a forgery, but the FBI is covering the fraud and no one in Congress is willing to tackle the situation because of fears of a “black backlash” if the failings of the nation’s first black president are revealed.
That’s a FOIA I want to read. WND has long moved beyond the conspiracies of Orly Taitz, which seems wise, because she’s doing even worse with this stuff. Her incomprehensible theory that Obama is using someone else’s Social Security number has it a snag, because she repeatedly screwed up the redacting of that info on her lawsuits, leading a judge to determine that she was “either toying with the Court or displaying her own stupidity.” On her blog, Taitz is reduced to begging fans for information about Hawaiians or leftists who, in theory, could have aided the Obama parents in a massive conspiracy. From the center of the Donald Trump campaign to here. It would be sad, if the actors weren’t so obviously dishonest.