The born conspiracy

Salon’s Mike Madden says sanity was nowhere to be found at the press conference held by the alarmists who believe Obama is not a U.S. citizen.

At first it was a relief to see that the conspiracy theorists who believe Barack Obama isn’t eligible to be president didn’t shoot any pumpkins at their press conference Monday afternoon. After all, the proponents of this latest theory seem to be heading for levels of mania that even Dan Burton never dreamed up as he investigated outlandish claims about Bill Clinton. (If you need to brush up on your conspiracies, Burton resorted to blowing away squashes in his backyard to show how Clinton had a hand in the murder of White House counsel Vince Foster.) But considering the Supreme Court had refused Monday morning to hear a lawsuit about Obama’s citizenship, there was reason to hope that maybe things at the afternoon press conference would stay reasonable.

Two and a half hours later, as dentist-slash-lawyer Orly Taitz harangued reporters for not investigating whether Obama’s mother was actually dead, that hope had been obliterated. It was crushed by a torrent of half-baked legal theories, vague platitudes about the Constitution and sinister “facts” assembled by a collection of true believers so extreme that even Michelle Malkin wants nothing to do with them. (Let alone actual Republican operatives, who appear to realize that questioning Obama’s citizenship isn’t the best way to begin their journey out of the political wilderness.) Although the news conference wasn’t quite over when Taitz began her harangue, it had been 15 minutes since a member of the audience compared Obama’s alleged electoral fraud to how Hitler rose to power — a sure sign it was well past time to leave.

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By Jan. 20, the courts — which have, so far, uniformly refused to treat this matter as anything other than a nuisance — will probably have left Schultz and his friends out in the cold. But the enduring power of any conspiracy theory comes from its ability to adapt to any circumstances, and this one is no exception. The only thing legal defeats teach the anti-Obama crowd is that the judges are in on it, too. Berg has another lawsuit up his sleeve if the ones he’s involved in fail, though he said he couldn’t talk about it because the proceedings have been sealed. For the foreseeable future, there could be “a new lawsuit for every action Obama takes” as president, Berg said. And to think Clinton had it bad.

You can read the entire column here.