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statistics, Alvin Onaka, had personally verified that the health department had Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate. She reiterated that state law prohibited anyone without a tangible reason from obtaining a copy of the original. Instead the department would issue the short-form “certificate of live birth,” which had already been produced and posted by the Obama campaign on his website.
    Then, in 2009, Fukino again put out a statement saying she had personally “seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen.” 2
    (Whatever Fukino and Onaka’s character and motives, the more people who must be lying for a conspiracy theory to work, the more implausible it is. Only two people—Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky—had to keep a secret about what happened in the Oval Office and, yet, within three years, the entire world knew.)
    Some people continued to believe the “birther” story anyway. Of course, it might be easier to convince them if every other crazy conspiracy theory about Democrats hadn’t been attacked as a vicious lie by the mainstream media before turning out to be true.
    Remember when it was a crazy conspiracy theory to imagine Bill Clinton had carried on an affair with Gennifer Flowers? Or that he had flashed Paula Jones? Or that he had molested an intern in the Oval Office? Also remember when the mainstream media believed John Edwards’s denial of his affair with Rielle Hunter—and then believed him again when he said her illegitimate child wasn’t his? Remember how it took a quarter century to find out what really happened at Chappaquiddick? And remember when conservatives had the nutty idea that global-warming fanatics were cooking the books, but the mainstream media marginalized them by calling them insane? And remember how the entire Democratic Party, Hollywood, and the mainstream media lied about Alger Hiss, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, I. F. Stone, and dozens of other Soviet agents for nearly half a century until the Venona Papers came out?
    Thanks, mainstream media!
    Frankly, after all the media’s jaw-dropping cover-ups—always in the same direction—it’s amazing conservatives aren’t bubbling over with conspiracy theories. Instead, the conspiracy theories always come from liberals. Indeed, insane conspiracy theories are often being hatched in the illustrious outposts of the mainstream media, from CBS’s Dan Rather to the New York Times .
    Presumably, if he cared to, Obama could request and release his “long-form” birth certificate. But he doesn’t want to. Liberals have intentionally fanned the flames of right-wing conspiracy-mongering in order to make all opposition to Obama seem deranged. Thus, in March 2010, Obama was able to dismiss the entire Tea Party movement as including “some folks who just weren’t sure whether I was born in the United States [or] whether I was a socialist.”
    Those are two very different claims. It’s perfectly possible to believe Obama is a socialist—based, for example, on his socializing health care, the auto industry, and much of the banking industry and his statement that he thinks the government should “spread the wealth around” 3 —but not believe he was born in Kenya. Using Obama’s sentence structure, the anti-war Democrats included some folks who weren’t sure if President Bush should be assassinated or whether he was a right-winger.
    It is liberals on TV, not conservatives, who are constantly yammering about Obama’s birth certificate. They’re not doing this to make conservatives look good. This is the only myth that begins to make conservatives look half as crazy as liberals.
    In fact, however, there is not a single Republican in Congress who claims to believe President Obama was not born in this country. Even Salon’s major investigative report, titled “Birthers in Congress,” produced