We're all Kenyans now!

I've mostly avoided the Birthers because I didn't want to give them air time. What we're seeing in the Birthers will be sort of interesting in the long run just because we're seeing what a flaky nutter movement looks like in time-lapse; they're exactly like the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists and the Apollo-landing-was-a-hoax crowds, except that now (thanks to the internet and cable TV), instead of it taking five years to assemble a book full of cherry-picked mistakes and fallacies and to save up the money to print a thousand copies through a vanity press, now you can just spew it out onto your blog in five minutes and be prattling away to an MSNBC host the next day. Orly Taitz's crazy-ass-what-the-hell? legal action will implode far more quickly, than, say for instance, Jim Garrison's, and it will be in large part due to the instantaneous international attention (people on the internet sussed out Taitz's use of fraudulent documents and questionable witnesses in two days; it took years with Garrison, and some people still don't know how crappy his case against Clay Shaw was). I expect the demise to be just as expedited, much as the "truther" movement's has been--it's not that there aren't adherents, lots of people still cling to the delusion that Oswald was innocent, for instance, or to the idea the World Trade Center was felled by missiles or lasers or something; but, let's face it, these are marginalized beliefs when you get right down to it.¹

So I'm not too worried about it. But then how could I resist this after seeing it in Salon: thanks to the wonders of the intertubes, you too can have your very own Kenyan Birth Certificate from the aptly-named Kenyan Birth Certificate Generator!

Here's the one I made--I didn't want to offer any personal information (could be some kind of funny-but-evil phishing thing, you never know), so I sort of winged it (with a little help from Wikipedia, actually); also, I'm clearly one sick and twisted little fuck:

Have fun!

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¹Okay, yes, I know: a distressing majority of the American population embraced JFK-related conspiranoia in the '90s after Oliver Stone mainstreamed it--so you can say there's some lasting damage there. On the other hand, it's not like it's something people talk about every day. For that matter, when was the last time you saw Oliver Stone on TV? JFK conspiranoia is, if you will, a mainstream marginal belief--something that a lot of people buy into if you ask them, but only in a kind of nebulous, half-assed sort of way. I think, ultimately, it's mostly harmless.