Michelle
takes a close look at the conspiracy-theory impulse on the Left, Right,
and fringe today in her syndicated column. Whether one thinks that
Sarah Palin has to prove her maternity of Trig or that Barack Obama has
to produce a witness to his birth in Hawaii or that the 19 al-Qaeda
terrorists actually flew commercial jetliners into the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon, the real truth is that these
conspiracy theories become belief systems based on conjecture and
speculation rather than actual facts and evidence:
The plain truth will never mollify a Truther. There’s
always a convoluted excuse – some inconsequential discrepancy to seize
on, some photographic “evidence” to magnify into a blur of meaningless
pixels – that will rationalize irrationality. Palin could produce
Trig’s umbilical cord and it still wouldn’t be enough.
Alas, Trutherism thrives on both the left and right. Which brings us to the spate of lawsuits challenging
President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship. On Friday, the U.S.
Supreme Court considers one of those suits filed by New Jersey citizen Leo Donofrio, who maintains that Obama is not a “natural born citizen” because his father held British citizenship.
There may be a seed of a legitimate constitutional issue to explore
here (how is the citizenship requirement enforced for presidential
candidates, anyway?) And at least Donofrio concedes that Obama was born
in Hawaii. But a dangerously large segment of the birth certificate
hunters have lurched into rabid Truther territory. The most prominent
crusader against Obama’s American citizenship claim, lawyer Philip Berg (who, not coincidentally, is also a prominent 9/11 Truther), disputes that Obama was born in Hawaii and claims that Obama’s paternal grandmother told him she saw Obama born in Kenya.
Berg and his supporters further assert that the “Certification of Live Birth” produced by Obama was altered or forged. They claim that the contemporaneous birth announcement
in a Hawaii newspaper of Obama’s birth is insufficient evidence that he
was born there. (Did a fortune-teller place it in the paper knowing he
would run for president?). And they accuse anyone who disagrees with
them of being part and parcel of the grand plan to install Emperor
Obama and usurp the rule of law.
I believe Trig was born to Sarah Palin. I believe Barack Obama was
born in Hawaii on U.S. soil. I believe fire can melt steel and that bin
Laden’s jihadi crew – not Bush and Cheney – perpetrated mass murder on
9/11. What kind of kooky conspiracist does that make me?
Just read the comments section, Michelle, and you’ll soon find out. (The column is also at NRO in shorter form.)