Birthers of a NationAmericans sure love a good conspiracy. Some of them won't even let go of their pet theory even once it's been debunked a few -- or a dozen -- times. Witness the folks who still think the Apollo 11 moon landing 40 years ago actually happened on a Hollywood sound stage. Or the countless Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists.
Well, welcome to the new grassy knoll. "Birthers" are a new, mostly conservative fringe group who are convinced that Barack Obama isn't a US citizen and therefore is an illegitimate president. This movement hinges on the mistaken belief that Obama can't be a citizen because his father wasn't and his mother was too young, and that Obama's Hawaii birth certificate.
The former point is patently, verifiably untrue, and the latter ... well, if they won't take the State of Hawaii's repeated official word for it that Obama was born in Honolulu, exactly what will they believe? But since when has conclusive evidence satisfied a conspiracy nut?
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It seems that the cleaner the record, the crazier and more absurd the efforts to tarnish that record have to be.
Case in point, Obama versus his detractors. This is obviously inane, and for someone like Lou Dobbs to say on the air that "all Obama needs to do is produce a certificate," despite the fact that Obama's already done so, can mean only one thing: even the Birthers know their conspiracy isn't tight enough to hold its own hot air.