It's sad that so many people have come to believe this because, of course, the evidence is indisputable: Obama was born in Hawaii. And no matter how hard the Birthers might try, no matter how many lawsuits Taitz and others bring, the courts are going to leave the man in his rightful place as president.

But Taitz doesn't just believe Obama is ineligible to serve as president, no: She also believes that he's hired goons to try to kill her, that he has killed others, that he's gotten Google in on his plot against her, that he's overseeing a plan to put untold numbers into camps run by FEMA, that he and others have conspired to use the swine flu vaccine for god knows what sorts of malicious mischief. In August, Taitz claimed she'd found Obama's "real" Kenyan birth certificate, which was easily proved to be fake. Next, the guy she claimed found it for her charged that Taitz had put him up to the forgery, and the ensuing tangle of lurid charges and countercharges is even too crazy for this post.

Taitz is indefatigable. No matter how many losses she suffers (and she's racked up more than her share), she presses on. Maybe it has to do with growing up behind the Iron Curtain; she came to the U.S. by way of Israel, but is originally from Moldavia. Or maybe it's the same sort of spirit that has propelled her to a unique but impressive array of professional titles: lawyer, dentist and real estate agent.

Come 2010, though, Taitz is likely to be a leader without any followers. Other Birthers have been slowly but steadily abandoning her, some for personal reasons, some because they've realized just how little knowledge of law and legal procedure is at Taitz's command. By the end of one case, which also saw the Birther attorney slapped with a $20,000 sanction, Taitz's own client had abandoned her.

None of that matters to Taitz. The judge is just acting under orders from the Department of Justice, the letter in which her former client disavows her could be a forgery, the Birthers with whom she's feuding are all just Obama plants who've been working to destroy the movement from the inside. In Taitz's world, the setbacks simply prove the global conspiracy behind Obama.

Evidence that Michele Bachmann stepped in a bucket of crazy? Take your pick. Calling Barack Obama un-American? Check. Death panels? Check. Encouraging armed revolt? Check. Calls for mass self-mutilation and/or suicide to protest the Obama regime? Check.

Forget truth. Hell, forget truthiness. The era of the Birthers is Bachmann's epoch, because the bar is so low. Indeed, there is no bar. Just as Glenn Beck can portray President Obama as a follower of Mao Zedong simply by connecting the two on a blackboard with chalk, Bachmann can go onto the House floor, spout out any odd claptrap that comes to mind, and still get reelected.

Bachmann thinks more carbon dioxide is a good thing, since it is a "natural byproduct of nature," just like syphilis, I suppose. She has warned that AmeriCorps could lead to "re-education camps" for young people; she suggested armed revolt to stop climate change legislation (urging her supporters to be sure they're "armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax because we need to fight back"). She keeps hinting that there is some creepy, sinister plot behind the 2010 Census.

Bachmann isn't just crazy, she's crazy's frothy-mouthed cheerleader. Take her speech on healthcare reform last August in Colorado, at a time when some Americans had lost perspective, composure and in some cases all grip on the facts during town hall-style meetings across the country. Bachmann happily stirred the big pot of lunacy. "This cannot pass!" she shouted at her Colorado audience. "What we have to do today is make a covenant, to slit our wrists, be blood brothers on this thing. This will not pass. We will do whatever it takes to make sure this doesn't pass."

Bachmann, of course, came to national attention just before the 2008 presidential election, when she declared on MSNBC's "Hardball" that she was "very concerned that [Obama] may have anti-American views." She went on to encourage a media and congressional investigation into the anti-American views of all of her enemies. Although her opponent, Elwyn Tinklenberg, began to surge in the polls, that November she clung to her seat. The people of Minnesota's 6th District will get to have a third referendum on crazy in 2010, when Bachmann will face one of two Democrats: physician Maureen Reed or state Sen. Tarryl Clark. Unbelievably to the rest of the world, Bachmann's two-year jag of crazy seems to have strengthened her hold on her seat, but it's still possible she'll step beyond the realm of orthodox, increasingly acceptable right-wing crazy into a new crazy frontier that could cost her politically.

Possible, but not likely.

Palin did an interview with conservative radio talker Rusty Humphries on Thursday. During their conversation, Humphries brought up a question apparently submitted by one of his readers: "Would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?"

The meaning of "the birth certificate" was clear. Humphries was asking about Obama's birth certificate, and the various myths about it: That he hasn't released a copy, that the copy he did release is a forgery and on and on. (If you missed it a few months back, my full debunking of the Birthers' theories is here.)

This is the exchange that ensued:

HUMPHRIES: Would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?

PALIN: Um, I think the public, rightfully, is still making it an issue. I don't have a problem with that. I don't know if I would have to bother to make it an issue, because I think enough members of the electorate still want answers.

HUMPHRIES: Do you think it's a fair question to be looking at?

PALIN: I think it's a fair question, just like I think past associations, past voting records, all of that is fair game. You know, I gotta tell you, too, I think our campaign, the McCain-Palin campaign, didn't do a good enough job in that area. We didn't call out Obama and some of his associates on their records and what their beliefs were, and perhaps what their future plans were, and I don't think that was fair to voters, to not have done our jobs as candidates and as a campaign to bring to light a lot of things that now we're seeing made manifest in the administration.

HUMPHRIES: I mean, truly, if your past is fair game and your kids are fair game, certainly Obama's past should be. I mean, we want to treat men and women equally, right?

PALIN: Hey, you know, that's a great point. That weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about, that Trig isn't my real son, a lot of people say, "Well, you need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he's your kid," which we have done, but yeah, so maybe we should reverse that and use the same type of thinking on the other one.

(Video of the interview is at the bottom of this post, with a hat-tip to HotAir's Allahpundit on Twitter; the relevant portion begins at roughly 7:45.)

Palin is, of course, wrong to say that the public is still "rightfully" bringing up the issue -- it's been answered again and again at this point, and there's no doubt that Obama was born in Hawaii. But she is right about a couple of things: For one, whoever the Republican nominee is in 2012, they won't "have to bother to make it an issue." It already will be, if not one discussed explicitly by the campaign and its surrogates, because so many Republicans already have doubts about the president's birthplace. The fact that Palin and other mainstream figures, like Lou Dobbs and Tom DeLay, have indulged the Birthers doesn't help matters.

Palin's also right to draw a parallel between the conspiracy theories that surround Obama's birth and the one about her son. The two are equally nutty. You'd hope, however, that going through that experience would teach her that it's an awful thing to happen to anyone, regardless of political party. Instead, her attitude seems to be that the two wrongs somehow make a right.

Update: Palin's now taken to Facebook -- where else? -- to do a walkback of sorts of her comments. In a post titled "Stupid Conspiracies," she writes:

Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask ... which they have repeatedly. But at no point -- not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews -- have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.

Of course, Palin's original remarks went further than this. And "conspiracy-minded reporters and voters" have asked about Obama's birth certificate too. The questions have been answered. As Hot Air's Ed Morrisey observed after Palin posted this, "It’s the same thing as Truthers saying that all they’re doing is 'asking questions.' The answers have already been provided; they just reject them because they’re married to their conspiracies.

The ad depicts three monkeys ignoring what some Birthers believe are the facts of the situation; Congress is seeing no evil, the courts are hearing none, and the media is speaking none. It declares "Obama is NOT an Article II Natural Born Citizen and therefore is NOT Eligible to be President," and asks for plaintiffs to join in lawsuits spearheaded by the people who took out the ad.

The problem? Beyond the fact that "Article II Natural Born Citizen" appears to be a term made up out of thin air, those responsible for the ad don't have a leg to stand on, legally. First off, they can get as many plaintiffs as they want; they still won't be able to show standing -- a particularized injury, basically -- and that means the suit will get tossed, and fast. Second, the Birthers have just decided that their interpretation of what the Founding Fathers meant when they said in the Constitution the president had to be a natural born citizen is the correct one, courts be damned. And they're wrong.

I've gone into this before, so to make a long story short: The Birthers believe that, in order to be a "natural born citizen," you have to be born in the U.S. to two citizen parents. Obama's father was a British citizen. As a result, Obama was a dual citizen at birth, and that, according to the Birthers, makes him ineligible for the presidency. They have seized upon "The Law of Nations," a text by Swiss philosopher Emerich de Vattel that appears to agree with their interpretation, and decided that its word is law. There are some issues with that -- first of all, they're relying on a translation produced after the Constitution was written. Before that, de Vattel's work didn't support the Birthers -- it didn't even contain the term "natural born citizen."

Beyond that, books by Swiss philosophers aren't binding upon U.S. courts. British common law, however, is an important source of American law, and it indicates that if your parents are residing in the U.S., just being born here to is enough to make you a natural born citizen. That, at least, is the view the Supreme Court took in the 1898 case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. Because the case wasn't really about that issue, and the discussion of natural born citizenship was a digression, today's courts wouldn't be bound by that opinion -- but they'd certainly give it quite a bit of weight, more than any ad in the Times would get.

(Hat-tip for the ad to Think Progress.)

Still, it does seem a stretch to think that California might elect a senator who sympathizes with the Birthers next year. But it's not out of the realm of possibility.

The Washington Independent's David Weigel has a good profile today of Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who's running as the conservative candidate in the Republican primary next year, providing the right with an alternative to Carly Fiorina, who's seen as too moderate. It's hard to imagine that DeVore will win, in part because of remarks like the one he made in this excerpt from Weigel's article:

Nonetheless, asked what he thought of Brown’s ideas, DeVore didn’t take the chance to denounce “birther” rumors or the movement itself–which has been heavily active in California.

“The president is doing himself no favors by spending millions of dollars to block the release of documents surrounding his birth certificate,” said DeVore. “As long as the president keeps fighting tooth and nail to prevent the release of such things, people are going to remain skeptical.” The door was left open, said DeVore, because Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign didn’t go after Obama’s qualifications when it had the chance, and because there were no statutory requirements for verifying a candidate’s citizenship.

Still, DeVore does have a shot at the Republican nomination (he'd have very little chance in a general election, however). The Congressional race in upstate New York this year, in which a third-party choice favored by conservatives pushed out the official Republican candidate, demonstrated just how much power activists on the right have in their party. And DeVore's getting endorsements from some prominent conservatives -- on Monday Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., gave his backing to DeVore in a post published on the Corner, one of the National Review's blogs.

Update: DeVore's campaign is trying to walk this one back, and to claim that Weigel took the candidate out of context. Weigel has posted a fuller transcription, though, which indicates that DeVore wasn't taken out of context at all.

The assemblyman's campaign has put out this statement, disavowing any Birtherism:

I said ten years ago that the move to impeach and convict President Clinton was a distraction from countering his liberal policies. So too is the effort now to question President Obama’s legitimacy. Make no mistake, the Constitution is clear: Barack Obama is the President. The more time Carly Fiorina’s campaign spends on this side issue, the less time we have to work against the far-left agenda and failed policies of President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and Senator Boxer.

A spokesman also told TPMDC, "Assemblyman DeVore believes that Barack Obama is the rightful, legitimate and constitutional President of the United States,"