The Best Lawyers That Racism Can Buy (With Update)

From The Washington Independent:

One of the more amusing quirks of the “birther” movement is the quality of the legal minds in whom Obama birth certificate obsessives are placing their trust — and their occasional donations. Phil Berg, the original “birther” lawyer, has been forced to pay out sanctions for legal malpractice. Orly Taitz, famously, got her law degree from an online correspondence school. And it turns out that Charles Lincoln, who has been assisting Taitz — he provided judges with amended complaints in Keyes et al v. Obama et al last week and he showed up at the last hearing on the case— has been disbarred in California, as well as Florida and Texas. * * *

Meanwhile, the turd in the Republican Party's pocket keeps growing. This piece from Politico -- titled GOP Headache: The Birther Issue -- sums up the problem nicely in the wake of the Mike Castle town hall debacle:

[B]irthers say members should expect more of the same in the coming weeks. “Absolutely,” says California resident Orly Taitz, the Russian-born attorney/dentist who has become a kind of ringleader for the movement. “It is a very important issue, one that politicians should have taken up a long time ago.”

Moments after speaking with POLITICO Saturday, Taitz posted a call to arms on her blog: “I believe it is a serious concern and I hope that each and every decent American comes to town hall meetings with a video camera and demands action,” she wrote.

Having seen his colleague Castle come under attack, Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) is taking no chances. “Before I got back to Michigan before the break, we’ll go through it, so that we’re versed in it,” Hoekstra said recently. “Just like anything else, if you see a hot issue ... it’s sort of like, ‘Let me go take a look at this and see what the status is.’”

Hoekstra believes there’s no “compelling case” questioning Obama’s origins. But after talking to Castle about his town hall, he knows that he’d better be ready with an answer.

The trick: What do you say?

Of the various approaches a put-on-the-spot pol can take, each carries its own risk of alienating constituents. Pick up a pitchfork in the cause of this conspiracy theory, and you risk damaging your reputation in the mainstream while aligning yourself with a movement some regard as having racist undertones.

Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.), co-sponsor of legislation that would force candidates to show their birth certificates, was widely mocked after he told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews that Obama is a U.S. citizen — “as far as I know.”

However, members who decide to challenge the conspiracy theory, as Castle did mildly, risk ticking off a shrill minority who can upend their events and then post the video on the Web.

And those who try to split the difference may find themselves getting doubly burned. At a Wyoming town hall in April, birthers jumped on freshman Republican Rep. Cynthia Lummis. “I’m not questioning your concern,” Lummis told the crowd, according to the Wyoming Eagle Tribune. “I am questioning whether there is credible evidence.” The congresswoman ended up asking for anyone who had “evidence” to send it to her.

At a walk-in meeting in Sen. Tom Coburn’s Washington office, birthers gave the Oklahoma Republican’s chief of staff nine pages of documentation in support of their claims. The group later billed the meeting a success on one of Taitz’s blogs. But when asked about the meeting, Coburn spokesman Don Tatro said that the office was simply trying to be “polite” and that “it is possible to mistake politeness for agreement.”

Of course, GOP Congressmen could easily handle this problem. When some whacko raises the issue at a town hall meeting, all they'd have to do call that person a complete nutjob and then move on. But this is something the Republicans cannot do, and that is why I find this story so freaking hilarious.

In fact, the Democrats should send operatives to GOP town hall meetings to make sure the birther issue is always raised. This is the greatest thing since the Republican Party's Terri Schiavo disaster.

UPDATE: It didn't take long for legendary idiot Jim Inhofe to step right into the pile of feces that is called the birther movement:

As you’ve already seen, Senator Jim Inhofe made a big splash today by telling the Politico that the birthers “have a point,” adding that he doesn’t “discourage” their movement.

But he’s now clarifying his claim, and blaming the White House for the persistence of birtherism. Inhofe now says that the birther point he was endorsing was specifically that the White House has not done a good enough job of rebutting the birthers’ charges.

Inhofe spokesman Jared Young sends me this new quote from Inhofe: “The point that they make is the Constitutional mandate that the U.S. President be a natural born citizen, and the White House has not done a very good job of dispelling the concerns of these citizens. My focus is on issues where I can make a difference to stop the liberal agenda being pushed by President Obama.”

My question to Inhofe is: Why would the White House want to do anything to "dispel the concerns" of a bunch of racist whackjobs who are causing you and other Obama enemies to repeatedly step on their own dicks?

By the way, this is hilarious.