The Truth About The Birther Movement

Joseph Farrah's speech at this Tea Party Convention this week brought the "Birther Movement"  back into the forefront at least for a few days. At the convention Farrah said that the "Birther movement" was a key part of the Tea Party agenda, a thought that seemed to be rejected by most of the people at the convention.  After his speech Andrew Breitbart and Farrah had a heated conversation about the speech and Brietbart's correct assertion the birther argument is "not a winning issue.” (read more about their spat at Hot Air)

I guess I can be considered a "reformed birther," When I first started seeing the evidence during the campaign it made sense to me. That was until I saw the Barack Obama birth announcements that ran in local Hawaiian news papers.  For those to be fake, Obama's mom would have to have seen into the future known he was going to run for president, and planted those announcements in 1961. The only other explanation was that someone at the DNC performed one of those Star Trek maneuvers, when they fly toward the sun to pick up speed, circle the sun and come back in the past. Since neither of those were rational explanations, right after the 2008 conventions, I published an anti-Birther post and took all of the other birth certificate stories of this site.

A story in today's Daily Beast caused me to remember where I first learned of the controversy surrounding the president's birth from disenfranchised Democrats, the PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass), former Clinton supporters who did not support Obama.

Investigations for my new book, Wingnuts, revealed that the Birther conspiracy theory was first concocted by renegade members of the original Obama haters, Party Unity My Ass, known more commonly by their acronym, the PUMAs. They were a splinter group of hard-core Hillary Clinton supporters who did not want to give up the ghost after the bitter 50-state Bataan Death March to the 2008 Democratic nomination.

In the early summer of '08, message boards on sites like PUMAParty.com began lighting up with the ultimate reversal-of-fortune fantasy—that their party's nomination could be overturned on constitutional grounds. "Obama May Be Illegal to Be Elected President!" read one representative e-mail: "This came from a USNA [U.S. Naval Academy] alumnus. It'll be interesting to see how the media handle this...WRITE TO YOUR LOCAL newspaper editors etc. Keep this out there everyday possible. Also write to the DNC too!"

That June, the Obama campaign released his certificate of live birth on its Web site as part of its "fight the smears" effort. Factcheck.org and other organizations examined the document in person and declared it genuine: "Our conclusion: Obama was born in the U.S.A. just as he has always said." But posters at the PUMA sites were unimpressed: "Nobody believes it's for real, except the Kool-Aid drinkers themselves."

A Clinton supporter from Texas known as Linda Starr was particularly fired up by what she later told me was "the daily misogynistic hate speech against Hillary" during the primaries. As a Democratic precinct captain in Medina County, Starr had volunteered for the Clinton campaign during the hotly contested June Lone Star State primary and served as a Clinton delegate at the state convention. But Starr's real talent was as an amateur opposition researcher—she'd dug up dirt against Republican congressional leaders like Dan Burton and Bob Livingston during the Clinton impeachment hearings in the late 1990s. She was also cited as a key source for CBS' discredited election year investigation into George W. Bush's National Guard records that led to Dan Rather's replacement after 24 years as the evening news anchor.

After Clinton's concession, Starr turned her attention to Obama. "I determined that I was going to start digging up every bit of dirt that I could find on him," she told me after I hunted her down in late 2009, "and that hopefully that I would find something against him that would convince the Democratic Party to dump him and make Hillary the nominee."

In the first week of August 2008, as the Democrats were getting ready for their convention in Denver, Starr called Philadelphia attorney Philip Berg and offered a challenge. Berg recalled the conversation for me: "She called me up and said, 'Have you heard about Obama not being national born?' I said, 'Yes.' She said, 'Well, now it's for real, and you're the only attorney in the country with brass balls enough to sue Obama.'"

Berg also had been a Clinton supporter, but he was best-known as a former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania and a serial unsuccessful Democratic campaigner for statewide office. He also had a reputation as an enthusiastic litigant: In 2004, he filed a 9/11 Truther lawsuit against Bush, alleging that the government allowed the terrorist attacks to happen and that the World Trade Center was destroyed from within. Now he had a new conspiracy to push.

Unfortunately, since that time the birther story has switched side. Even though though most of those in the conservative and in the tea party movement do not believe the POTUS was born outside the US, their belief is used as a way to discredit everybody on the right.

Last July Hawaii's Dept. of Health Director reiterated the statement she made just before the election.

"I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawai'i State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawai'i State Department of Health verifying Barrack Hussein Obama was born in Hawai'i and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008 over eight months ago...

Here's the point,not only has Obama been proven to be American born many times over, the only person helped by the whole busisness is Barack Obama.

If I were President Obama and there were no birther movement, I would invent one. It destroys the credibility of anyone who talks about it. To moderates and liberals, the birther movement is the right-wing equivalent of those moonbats who were calling the 2000 election stolen, years after the election was over-- its a bit crazy.

Worse than the fact the birther argument has been wrong many times over, it takes attention from the real arguments, Cap and Trade, Obamacare, the Federal Deficit.

For those of you who don't believe that Obama is American born, look at it a different way, as Andrew Brietbart, told Joseph Farrah during the Tea Party Campaign, it is not a winning issue.  Just like the lugnuts who are still counting chads a decade after George Bush defeated Al Gore, you are not going to win.  Besides if the birther thing was true, the SCHMOTUS, Joe Biden would have let is slip it out months ago.

The only one served by the Birther movement is Barack Hussein Obama, because it gives him and his cronies the opportunity to dismiss the entire lot of us. Birthers wake up, the time for you to let it go passed a long time ago.  Barack Obama may not be our kind of American, but he is an American never-the-less.  Lets fight against his policies, those are the arguments that we can win.

There is a second issue about Obama's birth. There are those who believe that he is born in the United States but unlike most democrats, do not believe that he was a "Virgin Birth,"  that argument about Obama's birth is perfectly legitimate.