When You Care Enough To Forge The Very Worst

Today is Barack Obama's birthday.

That is, if he was really born. At all.

The Intertubes are abuzz with the latest attempt by Orly Taitz to file a lawsuit proving Obama wasn't born in Hawaii like the birth certificate and the Hawaiian newspapers claim, but from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse after all I mean his father's home nation of Kenya. The argument had been Obama's short form certificate was a fake, never mind that reputable people (even the World Daily Net people also saw it) have seen it and judged it legit: the counter-argument was that the Birthers needed to find real evidence for their claim, such as a Kenyan birth certificate, before anyone could even take them half-seriously.

Taitz submitted a birth certificate for some lawsuit in Florida claiming just that.

The debunking of that certificate began about ooooh 5 seconds after it got onto the Tubes. Primarily that the document has anachronistic errors - labeled 'Republic of Kenya' when at the time of the birth's documentation the country was officially a 'Dominion', that Mobassa was in Zanzibar and not Kenya at the time, that the names of the registrar mimic the names of registrars from an Australian birth certificate easily viewable online - that showed said document couldn't be what it claimed to be.

I'm gonna quote from About.com's David Emery for a minute:

The debacle shines a light on two fatal flaws of the birther movement: one, their blatantly inconsistent and prejudicial standards of evidence — i.e., they're perfectly willing to accept (and circulate) unsourced photographs of an unvetted document as "proof" of foreign birth, while dismissing out of hand a state-issued, state-validated U.S. birth certificate; and two, what the foregoing reveals about their true motives — i.e, despite their protestations, they have no interest whatsoever in truth, accuracy, or "protecting" the U.S. Constitution, but are bent, rather, on delegitimizing Obama's presidency at any cost and by any means possible.

Amen.

From this, I have a few points and questions:
1) Anyone think of calling up a university in Kenya and see if there's a directory archived from the 1961-64 era that would list the Registrars working for the government back then? Just checking the University of Florida's library catalog found me two Kenyan government directories from 1966 and 1969 (both in Storage), and that's a Florida college. You'd think their nation's own schools would have more comprehensive holdings. See if the Registrars (especially this E.F. Lavender, whose name is apparently also a detergent) have an entry, and cross-check the names.
1a) Better yet, get in touch with the Registrar's offices and see if there's anyone still employed who would know who the Registrars were back when this document was supposedly filed.

2) What was Orly Taitz doing involved in a Florida-based lawsuit? I thought her license to practice law was limited to just the state of California. Where was this 'Kenyan birth certificate' filed?

3) Why are even talking about this conspiratorial nonsense? Oh, yeah I forgot. THE DAMN MEDIA ALLOWS IT.

I admit to having interests in conspiratorial stuff: huge X-Files fan here, got a copy of the Big Book of Conspiracies on my shelf somewhere. I've even got my own thoughts on who killed JFK (and why a cover-up was necessary). But even I know the difference between slightly titillating nonsense that tweaks my reading habits and this crap about Obama's birth status that extremists are using to stir up talk of coup d'etats and actual military misconduct. Too many crazy people are taking this sh-t seriously. And that's not good for the rest of us. It'd be nice if I could stop talking about it, but it's either this or the pre-planned Republican Riots at Congressional town halls this month for discussion.

Sigh. The crazy is not gonna end anytime soon.