Crazy "Birthers"

Update below

After publishing my previous post this morning, in which I ended on some comments about crazy "birthers," I received an e-mail from an anonymous person "arguing" (I use the term loosely here) that the vote on Sotomayor should be postponed because Barack Obama's presidency is illegitimate. The "argument"? That Obama couldn't be president because he holds "dual citizenship" with the U.S. and with Kenya. I won't publish the comment because the writer does not identify himself/herself and because it seems to have been some kind of robo-response. It might have been copied from some mass e-mail, for it bears the characteristics of those blightful communications (illogical sentences, confused content, inflated language). But I've summarized the gist of the comment here.

As Steve Benen notes, these people never quit, no matter how many times they have been confronted with the facts. The non-partisan Factcheck.org also is fed up with responding to these folks, as indicated in the post "The Last Word? We Wish."

We at FactCheck.org are grateful to the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists for hundreds of thousands of page views to our "Born in the U.S.A." article from last November, and to our other items debunking some of their more outrageously false claims. We’re less grateful for their thousands of sometimes abusive e-mails claiming that we’re perpetuating a dangerous falsehood, among the more printable comments. Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii Department of Health, is also fed up. She has now released her second statement (the first was made last November) saying that state records show Obama was indeed born in the U.S.A. This one states unequivocally that he is "a natural-born American citizen," and will everyone please just leave it alone now? (We confess we are paraphrasing that second part.)

And in case my readership (which is small!) actually includes crazy birthers, here is the link to Factcheck.org's 2008 post on Barack Obama's citizenship: "Born in the USA: The Truth about Obama's Birth Certificate," posted August 21, 2008 and updated November 1, 2008. And in March, FactCheck.org fielded another silly claim by birthers: "More Citizenship Quibbles."As far as dual citizenship, Factcheck. org addressed that bit of silliness back in 2008, too: "Does Barack Obama Have Kenyan Citizenship,". As the factchecker on that issue noted, after a good discussion of that issue:

"the Kenyan Constitution prohibits dual citizenship for adults. Kenya recognizes dual citizenship for children, but Kenya's Constitution specifies that at age 21, Kenyan citizens who possesses citizenship in more than one country automatically lose their Kenyan citizenship unless they formally renounce any non-Kenyan citizenship and swear an oath of allegiance to Kenya.

Since Sen. Obama has neither renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on Aug. 4,1982.

But, then, as my husband has often reminded me, crazy people are not rational, and, thus, facts mean nothing to them.

Update: More on those birther statistics in the South can be found here: "Early Poll Data: Half Of All Virginia Voters Are Birthers," Eric Kleefield, posted on Talking Points Memo, 3 August 2009.