Thanks to Justice Clarence Thomas, the U.S. Supreme Court will spend part of today
considering a lawsuit questioning President-elect Barack Obama’s citizenship. It is just one of a dozen or more lawsuits by far-rightwing lunatics trying to overturn the election based on totally bogus and nonsensical claims that Obama is engaged in some kind of grand conspiracy to cover up the details of his birth.
The fact that Clarence Thomas would give one of these suits the sheen of credibility by forwarding it to his Supreme Court colleagues is a real insult, especially coming from the only black justice on the court. But it is nothing less than what I expect from Thomas.
I always thought it was odd that the wingnuts were tryng to make an issue out of Obama’s birth records when it was their nominee, John McCain, who was clearly not born in the United States. Technically, McCain was still OK because he was born on a military base in Panama, but for crying out loud talk about people throwing stones in glass houses.
Obama tried to defuse the bogus controversy early on by posting a copy of his birth certificate on his campaign website, but that only sent the unhinged, reality-impaired idiots to go off barking about “kerning” and other supposed “evidence” of forgeries.
As Steve Benen notes, to believe that Obama was not born in Hawaii, one must not only accept that he forged his Hawaiian birth certificate with the full complicity of the Hawaiian authorities, but also that his family had to have the foresight 47 years ago to post a bogus birth announcement in a Hawaiian newspaper. You see, they KNEW back then that he would be president someday so they started plotting way back then to cover up his foreign birth, blah, blah, blah....
And this is just the kind of blather you get from some rightwingers today. My op-ed piece at the E-N,
now up to 124 comments drew out a whole nest of these people to rant and rave about Obama’s supposed birth certificate conspiracy (along with repeated racist references to Obama as a “mutt” meaning of mixed race).
I would just add that my conservative friend
JimmyK, to his credit, has been knocking this particular loony theory down at his blog for sometime now.
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