Conspiracy theorists never give up

Don't you just love conspiracy theorists? Less than a month after the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, which conspiracy theorists claim was faked, despite the video shot of the astronauts bouncing around in the one-sixth gravity (oh, yeah, that was filmed in Arizona!) and the retrieval of moon rocks, we have true believers insisting that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii and is, therefore, not an American citizen.

I had pretty much overlooked this national crisis until reading a Washington Post article about an effort by Republican congressmen to require presidential candidates to produce a birth certificate. But, as so often happens with news posted on the Web, the reader comments (scroll to the bottom) were even more interesting than the article itself. Despite the publication of Obama's birth certificate (it's available online through Hawaii public records) and the Hawaii newspaper birth announcement, the conspiracy theorists are insisting that Obama was not born in Hawaii. Most claim he was born in Kenya, his father's homeland.

This, to the conspiracists' thinking, makes him ineligible to be president. The Constitution requires that a president be a "natural born" citizen. That term is undefined, but it is assumed to mean that he was born a citizen, not "naturalized" through the immigration process. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bob Hope (born in England to British parents and once discussed as a vice presidential candidate) would not qualify. But because his mother was a U.S. citizen, Obama would also be a U.S. citizen. My wife has cousins who were born in Norway to her Goldsboro-native aunt and her Norwegian-born husband. Their birth gave them dual citizenship, and they could choose to which country to pledge allegiance (they both opted for the good ol' USA). Obama's status, if born in Kenya, would be the same, so he, too, would be a "natural born" citizen. John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, by the way, and all of the early presidents, up through Andrew Jackson, was born before there was a United States. They still qualified.

But, as can be seen by the scores of comments to the Washington Post article, the conspiracists are going nuts (maybe that's a redundancy) over this issue. They insist that the Hawaii birth certificate isn't valid, that the newspaper microfilm is faked and that the Hawaii Republican governor's certification of those records as legitimate is a political ploy.

As the Post article points out, some Republican officials are a bit tired of the conspiracy theorists. They think this focus on a 48-year-old birth certificate wastes time that could be better put to the more important issues of the day, such as the budget deficit, the faltering economy, Social Security's coming insolvency, health care reform, industrial policy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, just to name a few. But the conspiracy theorists, God love 'em, insist that the really important issue of the day is how a vast left-wing conspiracy managed to fake birth certificates and newspaper articles and fool a majority of the American people.

Get out your tin-foil hats!