Truthers to the left of me, truthers to the right

by Michelle Malkin

Creators Syndicate

Copyright 2008

Did you know that Sarah Palin-haters are still trying to prove she didn’t give birth to her youngest son, Trig? These tinfoil hat-wearers are as obnoxious and unhinged as the 9/11 Truth cultists who insist that America engineered the jihadi attacks on itself. The presidential campaign may be over, but there’s no expiration date on Palin Derangement Syndrome.

Jack Bogdanski, a law professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, stirred up Trig Trutherism again this week with a post on his website exposing “Sarah Palin’s fake pregnancy belly.” Armed with frontal photos of Palin’s stomach, Professor Bogdanski declared: “The March 26 photo is the smoking gun. There really is no chance that there’s a baby in there who will be born 23 days later at six pounds birth weight. And there really is no chance that the child grew so suddenly over the following two weeks…Sarah Palin is not the mother.”

We’re all obstetricians now!

This nonsense began with left-wing Internet rumors that Gov. Palin was really Trig’s grandmother and that she was covering up for the “real” mother of Trig – her teenage daughter, Bristol. The conspiracy was hyped by The Atlantic’s r esident excitable womb-chaser, Andrew Sullivan, and later amplified by “respectable” journalists like CNN/Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz. As the fever swamps roiled, an Alaska TV reporter, Cherie Shirey, stepped forward to squash the paranoia with a statement to the liberal Huffington Post:

“These internet rumors are very bizarre. We worked with Governer Palin many times in 2008. Our reporters worked her on location and in the studio and I worked with her myself. She was definitely pregnant. You could see it in her belly and her face. The whole idea that Sarah Palin wasn’t pregnant with Trig is completely, absolutely absurd.”

Shirey was ignored. Profile shots of a heavily pregnant Palin taken in April 2008 didn’t satisfy the Fake Belly! mob, either. The disclosure that Bristol was in fact pregnant with her teenage boyfriend’s child did not quell the insanity. Neither did a health assessment from Gov. Palin’s personal physician affirming her five pregnancies nor did contemporaneous hospital accounts of the birth nor did Palin’s accounts of nursing Trig.

It’s only a matter of time before someone accuses Palin of planting fake breast milk on her pump.

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?

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Here’s an excerpt of Philip Berg’s 9/11 Truther manifesto for all of you who have made him your new hero:

“It is time for the nations of the world to come forth and take the leadership because of the failure of the United States Government and the States where crimes were committed on 09/11/01, where no thorough investigation and indictments occurred, to investigate, arrest and prosecute the people responsible for the murders on 9/11/01, specifically including George W. Bush and Richard Cheney. ”

“Bush and his cronies made 9/11 happen or let it happen. And, if they let it happen, then they made it happen. Either way, they are responsible; and more important, they have completely and unequivocally covered-it-up!”

…That an event such as 9/11 was desired by powerful Administration figures, including Cheney and Jeb Bush, the President’s brother, is a matter of record, as the Project for the New American Century’s [PNAC] blueprint for worldwide U.S. dominance entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” stated that the program they advocated could win popular support only with the help of a “catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor” which (we are supposed to believe to be coincidence) came to pass just 8 months after many of the co-signers of the PNAC document assumed high positions in the new Bush Administration in January 2001.

ORDER IT NOW

As President John F. Kennedy stated, “Things do not just happen; they are made to happen.” There has never been an investigation of 9/11 that had not concluded, before it even began, that the Official Story convicting Osama bin Laden and absolving the Administration and the military of complicity of anything worse than “intelligence failures,” which thereby made the outcome a foregone conclusion.

It is time that the men who had the motive, means and the opportunity to commit the terrible crimes of 9/11, and who have profited by it politically as well as financially, be exposed for their role and held to account.

The world has suffered since the horrific acts of Bush and his cronies on 9/11, that being the events of 9/11 and the aftermath, the illegal act of war against Afghanistan and Iraq that has caused the death and injury of hundreds of thousands, including thousands of U.S. troops; the destruction of property and the enormous costs involved.

Saddam was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death after being convicted of murder in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from an Iraqi town where assassins tried to kill him in 1982. This number of killings that Saddam Hussein was found guilty of is far less than Bush and his cronies caused to die on 9/11.

The 148 Iraqi deaths for which Saddam was tried pales in number to the 750,000 dead at the hands of George W. Bush as a result of this illegal invasion of that country which includes babies, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, elderly grandmothers and grandfathers, killed without remorse by George W. Bush and his war profiteering supporters.

Bush continues the war in Iraq to keep the world’s attention there and not on the atrocities caused by him on 9/11, including the possibility of Bush sending up to 40,000 more troops to Iraq, even though a majority of the American people are against this increase.

The world must act now because our own government has failed us. We cannot relent until real justice is reached. Only by exposing the truth of 9/11 and revealing how it was used as the “trigger event” to justify the neocon’s imperial policy can we put these events in proper prospective.”

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More conspiracy-mongering: A Politico writer speculates that Justice Clarence Thomas distributed Donofrio’s application for conference as some sort of payback for Obama’s opposition to Thomas. Grow up already.

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Oh, criminey.