I'd say the Birthers' claims are of less relative merit than the Truthers', if only because they are advancing specific and readily falsifiable claims.

Ever hear of the Town of East Redmond? No? That's because the courts declared that it never existed, over seven years after the town thought it had incorporated itself.

Quo warranto proceeding against officials of a purported municipal corporation of the fourth class. The Superior Court, King County, James W. Hodson, J., found the incorporation null and void and ousted the officials from their respective offices. An appeal was taken. The Supreme Court, Hunter, J., held that a statute providing that incorporation of a municipal corporation of fourth class if otherwise valid except for compliance with statutory limitation of area to one square mile was validated was insufficient to validate incorporation where proceedings were invalid both by reason of area requirements and population requirements.

State ex rel. Carroll v. Bastian, 66 Wn.2d 546 (1965).

Doughy Pantload says what?

if only this brilliant socialist conspiracy had resulted in any actual socialism...

The funny part is, there is a Socialist Conspiracy, but it was by Cheney and the other Socialists that wanted American citizens to pay the Too Big To Fail Banks profits when they did well and bail them out when they failed.

Now that is a conspiracy.

"They certainly formed the most vocal majority behind Ron Paul in the 2008 election."

Nope. Most of the Paul-bots are obsessed with ending the Federal Reserve.

Fine. Lets turn back the clock a little further to 2000, and do a hand re-count of every ballot in Florida, and if it says Gore won the state, undo all of Bush's works immediately, including leaving Iraq.

birthers... BIRTHERS!... ohh, I thought we were talking about birders... n-n-nnnnevermind

@1: Jet Fuel not burning hot enough to weaken steel, WTC Building 7 being brought down intentionally, and a missile striking the Pentagon instead of Flight 77, are all specific and falsified claims. No Truther claim has merit, none, nadda, zip, zilch, zero.

And yet the questions never go away...

Who is Barack Obama?

We still don't really know.

I understand that some of the birther types want to go one step beyond even THAT looniness: once McCain/Palin is recognized as the winners, McCain gets the boot because he was born in Panama, not the US - thus giving us - wait for it:

President Palin.

You may now clean the vomit off your monitor.

Seems like the conspiracy theorists are always glossing over critical details, or lying. The president and vice president are NOT elected to together. While they do run together, when the electors in each state meet to vote they cast TWO ballots, one for president and one for vice president. So even if the president weren't qualified to hold the office, which he is, there is no legal basis for throwing out electoral vice presidential votes cast for Biden.

They do know that even if the President and Vice President, for whatever reason, were simultaneously removed from office at once, the Speaker of the House takes over, not the guy who didn't win? It doesn't matter the reason, the Constitution is pretty clear on the case...

Has Jonah Goldberg ever written something that wasn't irredeemably stupid?

Truthers cannot be considered the left's equivalent of Birthers. If, during the Bush years, you had asked a Democratic member of Congres- ANY Democrat in Congress- what they thought of Truthers, you would have heard something along the lines of "that's crazy, those people are kooks." They had no access to the establishment. If you ask a Republican member of Congress about the Birthers today, you might hear a dismissal of them as kooks, but you are also quite likely to hear some dark murmurs about "oh, I don't know, Obama really ought to produce his birth certificate"- in other words, Birthers have support in the Republican establishment. And that makes an enormous difference. A conspiracy theorist group with no establishment support is politically irrelevant and can be ignored or treated as sideshow freaks, but a group with establishment support is one that could potentially do real damage- and it says something profoundly negative about the Republican Party that its elected members are willing to endorse this garbage.

The right's attack on Obama, and on Clinton before him, relect a desire to view the Reagan Revolution as a permanent repudiation of the Democratic Party. If, after Reagan, a Democrat is elected president, it MUST be a fraud or an error, because Reagan changed everything and the Republicans are supposed to have a permanent majority and the Democrats aren't supposed to hold power anymore.

Well, guess what, morons. We are here, we are liberals, we have always been here, and we aren't going away. The Reagan and Gingrich revolutions have failed. You never had, and never will have, the right to a permanent monopoly on power in this country. Elections have consequences, and sometimes we win and you lose. GET USED TO IT.