Congress is wrestling with historic health care reforms, soldiers are dying in far off lands and President Barack Obama is fighting to keep the economic recovery on track. But on the wilder shores of the American Right, the question that refuses to die is whether Mr Obama was genuinely born on US soil. If not, he would be ineligible to be President. Conspiracy theorists and far right wingers, who have begun to call themselves "birthers", maintain that Mr Obama is not entitled to be President of the US because he is "foreign born". The White House has published copies of Mr Obama's official birth certificate - a printed summary of his birth details, including the name of the medical centre in Honolulu, Hawaii, where he was born. But the conspiracists maintain there is something suspicious in the absence of a photocopy of his original birth record, known as the "long form". This would have been prepared by doctors or hospital officials involved in his birth and would contain fuller details - including the address of his parents. They dismiss as a distraction a birth announcement for Mr Obama that appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser on August 13, 1961 - nine days after he was born. George Gordon Liddy, the former Nixon supporter who served a four and a half year prison sentence for leading the Watergate burglary and who is now a conservative talk radio host, said: "This whole thing could be settled in a minute if the President would simply produce a valid birth certificate." Mr Liddy maintains that Mr Obama was in fact born in Kenya, his father's home country, and claims to have seen a deposition by the President's Kenyan step-grandmother, 86-year-old Sarah Obama, stating that the city of his birth was Mombasa. The President is therefore "an illegal alien", Mr Liddy says. The debate might have continued to bubble away beneath the radar of most Americans had the suspicions not been given a mainstream airing by Lou Dobbs, a popular CNN commentator and host who has his own popular radio show broadcast by the network. Mr Obama should do more to dispel the claims, he said on his programme - a mixture of news and opinion - last week. "When this could be dispelled so quickly, and simply by producing it, why not do it?" he asked. CNN has attempted to distance itself from the doubts of Mr Dobbs and the beliefs of the conspiracy theorists, displaying Mr Obama's "short" birth certificate on air. "To a large and vocal group of Americans, this paper (birth certificate) that I just showed you might as well be bathroom tissue," said Rick Sanchez, one of the station's news anchormen. But their claim, he added, was "a completely unfounded story". The television company's president, Jon Klein told staffers of Lou Dobbs Tonight that the controversy regarding the legitimacy of Mr Obama's birth certificate now appeared to be a "dead" story. In an email, he said that CNN researchers had determined that Hawaiian officials discarded paper documents in 2001. Because of that, Obama's long-form birth certificate no longer exists and the shorter certificate of live birth that has been made public is the sole official record. "It seems to definitively answer the question," he said. Other investigators have meanwhile established that the supposed deposition from Mr Obama's Kenyan step-grandmother was in fact no more than a partial transcript of a telephone conversation with the woman, who does not speak English. According to the transcript, the caller suggested Mr Obama was born in Kenya but was told by the translater that he was mistaken. The renewed controversy has outraged the American Left and horrified many conservatives too. The liberal radio host, Steven Collins, said: "We have serious issues right now. We have a huge economy, millions of people out of work. "It's so ridiculous that we're sitting here tonight wasting time talking about, 'Is he an American?' Come on!" The reason, he said, was that "many people in this nation cannot still accept the fact that a brilliant African-American is the commander-in-chief, and they're looking for ways to reduce the greatness of his purity as a person who is serving this nation." Joe Scarborough, a former Republican Congressman who hosts his own cable news show described the "birthers" as "cartoon characters". "Instead of trying to actually figure out what's happening to their country, the terrible things that are happening economically to their country," such people would rather "embrace conspiracy theories," he said. He compared the conspiracy theorists to people who believe "the United States government blew up its own buildings and killed its own people on September 11", or that American astronauts "never landed on the moon." Michael Medved, a conservative talk-show host, described the leadership of the so-called "birther" movement as "crazy, nutburger, demagogue, money-hungry, exploitative, irresponsible, filthy conservative impostors." They caused terrible damage to the conservative movement, he added. "It makes us look weird. It makes us look crazy. It makes us look demented. It makes us look sick, troubled, and not suitable for civilised company."Right Wing US conspiracists question Obama's birth certificate
On the fringes of the American right, a growing conspiracy claims that Barack Obama is hiding a Kenyan birth certificate, making him ineligible to serve as president.
Sunday, 26 July 2009
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