Lou Dobbs sudden departure from reality seems familiar to that of Glenn Beck in the weeks leading up to his leap from CNN's over to The Fox News Channel. Now Mr. Dobbs seems to have transitioned from riding the razor's edge of plausible lucidity to straight up bat-shit crazy. Dobbs actually first began giving the birthers a boost last week, when he had Alan Keyes, who ran against Obama in 2004 and 2008 and is now suing over the ligitamacy of the president's birth certificate.
However, Dobbs is sturring up the mix by screaming fire in a crowded theatre and then sticking around to be a witness. It allows him to play the unbiased advocate, the guy sticking up for the concerns of the average American no matter how obsurd the topic. It all plays out so well for him in contrast to the allegedly liberal reporters, who are, according to Dobbs, "more interested in currying succor with the White House than in doing their jobs."
On his radio show Tuesday, Dobbs was back at it, discussing the issue at length and responding to requests for comment from media outlets including Salon. (As of this post, a CNN spokeswoman had not yet been able to provide any comment.)
"We'll have some answers for the Los Angeles Times, Salon, a few others, Politico too. You know, and if you're in the left wing of the political spectrum, come on down, because we're going to have us a little talk about, oh, all of those crazy things that the American people just want to know," Dobbs said.
"Some of the news organizations in this country are acting as if they have their very identity attached to the issue of his birth certificate."
Later in the day, Dobbs brought the issue to CNN again. This time, it was part of a panel discussion at the end of his show with a decidedly unbalanced panel: Just three talk radio hosts, none of whom seemed to have any actual facts at hand -- not that they would have contradicted the anchor anyway.
One of the panelists, WPHT's Dom Giordano, noted that he's actually friends with Phil Berg, a Pennsylvania attorney who was one of the original leaders of the birther movement, and that his son once worked for Berg. (Giordano didn't mention that Berg has also
represented him in a lawsuit before.)From the beginning of his coverage, Dobbs has been repeating a familiar trope of the birthers and their supporters: If Obama would just release his real birth certificate, the long form rather than the certification of live birth he made public last year, then all of this would be over.
"I believe Barack Obama is a citizen of the United States, folks, don't you? But I do have a couple of little questions, like you. Why not just provide a copy of the birth certificate? That's entirely within the president's power to do so. Then all of this nonsense goes away," Dobbs said on his radio show Tuesday.
"One would think the president would want to get rid of this nonsense. But he doesn't. And so none of us knows what the reality is."
But Dobbs knows that the crowd of conspiracy theorists he's now supporting won't be placated that easily. When he brought Keyes and Taitz on his show, he mentioned that he'd asked Taitz, off-air, whether the release of a long form birth certificate would satisfy her.
"She said no," Dobbs told his audience, and then directed the question to her again. "Both parents have to be citizens in order to satisfy the requirements of natural-born citizen," Taitz responded. In other words, for the de facto leader of the movement, her questions can never go away, because Obama's father was a British citizen at the time of his son's birth. (For the record, Taitz is wrong about the law here, as she very often is; in the 1898
Wong Kim Ark case, the Supreme Court said a child born in the U.S. is a natural-born citizen regardless of their parents' citizenship.)Besides, Dobbs is completely wrong about the legal status of the certificate of live birth that Obama released. He said Tuesday that "there is no actual birth certificate. There is a document that says there is a birth certificate." But what Obama has made public thus far is the same form that anyone requesting their birth certificate from Hawaii would receive, and state officials have made very clear that it's authentic and shows he was born there.
Taitz and others say, wrongly, that there's a Hawaiian statute that applied to Obama that would have allowed his parents to register a foreign birth there, and somehow get state officials to say he was born in Honolulu. But as Janice Okubo, the director of communications for the Hawaii Department of Health, recently
You could not get a certificate saying you were born in Honolulu. The state has to verify a fact like that for it to appear on the certificate. But it’s become very clear that it doesn’t matter what I say. The people who are questioning this bring up all these implausible scenarios."
That gets to the heart of the problem here. While Dobbs' colleagues at CNN, like
And that raises a question: With other CNN hosts having offered the actual facts on the air -- Pilgrim even attributed the debunking to the network itself -- why is Dobbs allowed to go on and make these false claims, without any hint of opposition? For now, CNN's not saying.