Birth Pains

If you read nothing else today, check out a piece by Salon's Mike Madden that's pretty much guaranteed to confirm your suspicions about anyone who still thinks Barack Obama can't be president because his citizenship is a sham. Madden covered a press conference on Monday that was held by some of the parties trying to get their cases against Obama heard in court. (One case has already been thrown out by the Supreme Court, no questions asked.)

And if you figured that these people were probably tin-foil-hatted dingbats who think HDTVs are part of a secret plot to alter America's brain chemistry and convert it to Yahweh Ben Yahweh, you're wrong.

They're crazier than that.

"Throughout the press conference, the conspiracy theorists had trouble keeping things focused. Harlem minister James David Manning wandered off on a tangent about how Obama's election still means 'there's never been a black womb.' that produced a president. Manning might have seemed like he was making a case against Obama based on some theory of black nationalism, except that he admitted he had endorsed John McCain in the campaign. That was after he had called Obama 'this usurper, this long-legged mack daddy.'

Taitz -- the lead attorney in the case the Supreme Court declined to hear Monday morning -- kept making stranger and stranger assertions. At one point, she asked why the government had fined broadcasters for Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction,' but didn't intervene to force the media to report on Obama's allegedly phony birth certificate. She claimed Obama holds passports from at least four countries, compared him to Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, equated the 'controversy' about Obama to Watergate, and finished her tour-de-force presentation by saying that if Obama can claim he's a U.S. citizen and win an election, then so could just about anyone. 'If a person can become a presidential candidate only based on his own statement,' she said, 'then somebody like Osama bin Laden, theoretically, can come and write a statement, 'I'm eligible,' and we should put him on the ballot, too?'"

Trust me, read on. It'll brighten your morning.

Salon: "The Born Conspiracy" by Mike Madden/12.9.08

Related:

DXM: Citizen Dicks/12.8.08

DXM: The Speed of Lies/8.28.08