WorldNetDaily

The best part of Farah’s commentary is when he argues that Elliott is wrong and WND’s reporter is right because of their respective bios. While Elliott has merely written for various places, WND’s reporter was in the Army and is “one of the most remarkable young women I have ever met.” Take that, Justin: Joseph Farah doesn’t think you’re remarkable!

The real meat of WND’s response, though, is in this post that “reveals” Justin Elliott’s ties to …  George Soros. See, Elliott contributed to CampusProgress.org, which is published by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank founded with money from George Soros. So … Soros! Ooga booga!

This investigation was written by Aaron Klein, who is WND’s Jerusalem Bureau Chief. Oh, and: “With research by Brenda J. Elliott.” It took two people, one of them a foreign correspondent, to Google Justin. Just like how it took two people to edit Barack Obama’s Wikipedia page to include birther conspiracy theories and then write a story accusing Wikipedia of bias after people removed those edits, which is something Mr. Klein and a “researcher” did in 2009.

(Besides his Wikipedia misadventures, Klein is most famous for constantly repeating the stunt of interviewing members of Hamas and reporting that they “support” or “endorse” various American liberals, which proves conclusively every single time that Democrats are terrorists, by the law of transitive Islamofascism.)

So, let’s talk about WorldNetDaily for a minute.

WorldNetDaily is a magnet for the dumbest, dullest wingnuts in America. Even its lawyer is a buffoon. Last year, WND sued the White House Correspondents’ Association because WND’s disreputable conspiracy website was only given one table at the Correspondents Dinner. (They do have a White House correspondent, actually. It’s Les Kinsolving, a tragicomedy of a man who is invited to briefings solely to be called on when the press secretary wants to answer a stupid question about who wrote the president’s memoir instead of a serious question about reality.) Anyway, their lawyer was Larry Klayman, who is not allowed to appear before courts in much of the United States because of his “total disregard for the judicial process.”

Here is a story from WorldNetDaily: “Soy is making kids ‘gay.’” It is in six parts. The original headline was “A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals.” WorldNetDaily demands your respect! It is a serious news organization!

In 2008, WND “reported” on shocking emails exchanged between Obama and a Kenyan politician. You should really go look at them. “I will kindly wish that all our correspondence handled by Mr Mark Lippert,” “Obama” “wrote.” (Subject line: “Let’s share a dream!” Bill Ayers must’ve written “Dreams From My Father,” because Obama himself is apparently not fluent in English.) Ahem:

The e-mails, apparently sent by Obama himself, referenced the senator’s aide, Mark Lippert. The e-mails were provided to WND by an insider in Kenya who fled Odinga’s Orange Democratic political party and requested anonymity because of the danger of retaliation.

“Apparently.” Journalism!

There is no end to the idiotic things printed at WorldNetDaily. Here’s Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate. Here’s a piece on how al-Qaida is sneaking nukes into the U.S. through the unsecured Mexican border in tandem with street gangs. Here’s white supremacist Vox Day asking why the media refuses to report that a mentally ill person claims to have had gay sex with Barack Obama.

WorldNetDaily knows its (large!) audience of halfwits will eat up any garbage it’s served, and, better yet, the rubes will buy any trash that’s for sale. (Tea-stained flags, anyone?)

Thanks to that substantial audience of the nation’s stupidest and most fearful elderly people, WND is actually an influential member in good standing of the conservative movement; the RNC rents its massive email list. Because of that usefulness to the party, Farah and his buddies are allowed to persist in the delusion that they are sane and perhaps even respectable. But everyone knows they’re frauds and crackpots. It takes five minutes of reading that bottomless repository of feverish bullshit to figure that out.

But WorldNetDaily considers Cain one of is own. Cain seems to write the columns himself (or at least he did initially, before his campaign took off), unless his ghost is particularly fond of exclamation points. None of them involve birtherism, which for years now has been WND’s sole driving concern. (Cain did flirt with bitherism earlier this year, thanks mostly to Donald Trump, but he now believes the president is an American.)

Farah, a friend of Cain’s for several years, told The Ticket that he has been surprised by Cain’s rise over the past few months. While Farah would not make an official endorsement, he said Cain is his “favorite” candidate.

Good work, Herman: You’ve got Farah’s support! That should be more than enough to overcome the fact that Cain is basically taking the month of October off from campaigning in order to sell his book, because this entire “presidential run” was basically done to create a little buzz around a burgeoning conservative media personality, and the fact that he’s now tied for second in the polls is due to the hilarious collapse of various other more “serious” campaigns.

Arpaio has a volunteer “posse program,” which allows regular citizens to pretend to be heroic characters in old westerns, instead of just sad old white people terrified of a changing nation and some intangible decline of privilege. This “posse program” has been dormant lately, because of budget cuts, but WND says Arpaio’s awakening his elite volunteer special forces for one last mission:

The “Cold Case Posse,” however, has been described as a “posse within the posse,” consisting of volunteers with professional experience in conducting investigations, including individuals chosen because of their professional backgrounds in law enforcement, as well as lawyers who have participated in criminal or civil cases and individuals with specialized skills in fields ranging from accounting to conducting criminal forensic examinations.

In the past few months, the Cold Case Posse has been inactive, largely because of budgetary limitations within the Maricopa County Sheriff’s office.

But in the past few days, Arpaio has assigned a 5-person group serving under the auspices of the Cold Case Posse to undertake the Obama birth certificate investigation.

Sources within the sheriff’s office explained to WND that the Cold Case Posse has been constituted as a 501(c)3 organization — separately organized within the 3,000-member volunteer posse — enabling people from around the country to contribute to its mission.

Hooray! Good on Sheriff Joe, for giving hope to the last remaining people unconvinced by the president’s extensive documentation of his birth.

WND is not exactly known for its accuracy in reporting, so this story could be imaginary, but assuming it’s not, I can’t imagine anyone finding anything wrong with the prospect of a white western sheriff forming a volunteer “posse” to go after a black man. That certainly doesn’t have any incredibly ugly historical echoes.

“Failing republics”! Why does Joseph Farah not believe in American exceptionalism?

Also, I know this is entirely beside the point, but: Hitler wasn’t ever elected president. He was appointed chancellor by German President Paul von Hindenburg. (The “loophole” that allowed Hitler to assume that office was that he legally obtained German citizenship.) When Hindenburg died, Hitler left the presidency vacant and (illegally) assumed the power of the office, but not the title. In other words: Hitler, who was legally eligible to be the president of Germany, was never the president of Germany.

Joseph Farah can’t even competently compare Obama to Hitler. This is basic wingnut stuff!

But Trump told Mother Jones that he did not actually tell Corsi any of these things. In fact, Trump says he did not even read Corsi’s book!

This confuses WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah. Is Corsi lying about what Trump said? Did Farah’s website just make up some nonsense and publish it because that is what they always do? Or is Trump in league with them?

The answer, obviously, is that Donald Trump is part of the vast conspiracy to make WorldNetDaily look ridiculous. As Farah says:

I have strongly begun to suspect that Trump had other motives than seeking the truth about Obama. I think he was pumping Corsi for information for some other purpose than being on the right side of history.

Plus, WND gave Trump an advance PDF copy of “Where’s the Birth Certificate,” meaning it is actually impossible that he didn’t read it, as he now claims.

Corsi went even further in an interview with (of course) Alex Jones. Jones and Corsi both seem to think that there is a distinct possibility that Trump is coordinating his campaign to make them look silly with the White House!

Becoming a birther was probably the best decision Donald Trump ever made. It caused him to meet such interesting people!

The certificate is a forgery

Ahem. Some FreeRepublic commenters are already on the case:

“Look at the document…it is superimposed on a different background that contains Onaka’s signature (hint: look at the curling on the left-hand margin of the text fields).”

“In 1961, blacks were called negro, colored, darkie, and several other less accepted names, but they were NEVER called ‘African’ as Urkel’s father was in this document. An American adult in 1961 would no more have called a negro ‘African’ than they would have called a homosexual ‘gay’. That alone is enough to raise huge questions about this document.”

“The Security Paper is a Photoshop. If you look at the full form, the ‘Security Paper’ is a background, the ‘Certificate of Live Birth’ appears like it was scanned from a book, the paper made to be transparent – and the ink and borders were then laid on a backdrop with the “Security Paper” background.”

His “African” father disqualifies him

One popular theory has it that “natural born citizen” does not mean what you think it means. Apparently, a “natural born citizen” has to have two American parents. So while Barack Obama has definitively proven that he’s a “native-born citizen,” he is still not a “natural born citizen,” thanks to his father being African. (This would also disqualify a number of past presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, and Chester Arthur, but no one would miss them.)

Something about British citizenship and the Kenyan constitution

I dunno, I don’t really get this one. Barack Obama had dual U.S./British citizenship which became U.S./Kenyan citizenship which then became Kenyan citizenship because he never renounced it.

He lost his citizenship

As WND has written: “Several court cases challenging Obama’s presidential eligibility have argued he gave up his U.S. citizenship in Indonesia and used an Indonesian passport to travel to Pakistan in the early 1980s. Indonesia does not allow dual citizenship.

Still a secret Muslim

One big hope of the long-form birthers was that Obama’s birth certificate would finally reveal that he is a secret Muslim. It does not reveal that, but there’s no reason they can’t still say it.

How did he get into Columbia?

Donald Trump already brought this one up, but the new frontier in questioning the president’s legitimacy is asking about his college years. Because, in their minds, there is simply no way a black man gets into a good school without receiving special favors or somehow cheating, the Schoolers are developing weird, complex theories about how Barack Obama transfered from Occidental to Columbia (and then got accepted into Harvard Law). The new rallying cry will be “release the transcripts.”

This will probably be the most popular of the new avenues of birtherism, though may not bleed into the mainstream discourse with as much ease as the birth certificate stuff, because it has no bearing whatsoever on the president’s qualifications to be president. Schoolerism is simply about proving that the president’s a phony who duped the world with his hoodoo, “the biggest affirmative action baby in history” in the detestable words of Mickey Kaus.

In the imaginings of the crowd desperately searching for evidence that Barack Obama is who they wish he was, the president was obviously, transparently unqualified to go to an elite university, because just look at him.

So birtherism will survive. It will mutate and adapt. There’s no satisfying some people.