Dave Weigel reports that after Orly Taitz's complete meltdown on MSNBC yesterday, as well as the complete debunking of the altered Australian birth certificate Taitz was shopping around as President Obama's "real" birth certificate, the other birther leaders have pounced:
The new focus on a bogus document from an anonymous source has riven the small community of activists who are trying to prove that Barack Obama cannot be president of the United States. The day after the image appeared online, prominent “birther” attorneys and activists worried that Taitz was doing real, irreversible damage to their movement. As she’s become the public face of the “birther cause”–on Monday, MSNBC labeled her a “leader” of the “birther movement”–other figures in the “birther” community are distancing themselves from her work and from this document.The most revealing interview with a birther leader wasn't conducted by a member of the press--it was conducted by Stephen Colbert, who asked Taitz simply if there was anything Obama could do to satisfy the birthers and prove he was eligible to be president. She said no. Of course there isn't! It's not rational. After Taitz' performance on MSNBC yesterday, coupled with the forged Kenyan birth certificate, I wonder how much longer this movement is going to last in any real organized form.
The birther movement has to be one of the most bizarre subcultures in American history--a byproduct of ongoing racism and American social pressure that has forced open admissions of racism from polite company. These people are simply incapable of accepting a black man as president of the United States, but they can't just say that--it just isn't done--so they've dedicated themselves to chasing windmills in an effort to somehow prove Obama is illegitimate by some point of fact. It doesn't matter that we know Obama was born in Hawaii, or that say, Chester A. Arthur's father was not a citizen when he was born. Obama is illegitimate by definition.
Fringe movements often follow a sort of pattern, where the initial genuine energy of fringe devotees is exploited for the financial gain of their leaders, who then collapse into infighting over reaping the benefits. The question I would ask is, how much money have these people raised from their followers who genuinely believe that somehow, they were going to defy reality and recall the president of the United States by "proving" he was not a citizen?
-- A. Serwer
