Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (49 page)

Billboards and bumper stickers appeared, asking, “Where is the birth certificate?” Conservative news websites of some venerability boiled the issue down to simple transparency. Cliff Kincaid, of Accuracy In Media, announced, on Obama’s forty-eighth birthday, that he was releasing a copy of his own birth certificate: “This certified copy of an original long form document is what anyone who wants to be president should be prepared to produce. Why is this a controversy? . . . Whatever happened to the public’s right to know?”
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A day later, Christopher Ruddy, head of the online source NewsMax, asked, “Where was Barack Obama born? It’s a fair question. But we still don’t know the answer because Obama won’t tell us, because he remains the most mysterious man ever to sit in the Oval Office.” However mysterious the president was, Ruddy nevertheless wanted to make it clear that he believed that Obama was “born somewhere in the state of Hawaii. Days after his birth, a small legal notice was printed in the local newspaper announcing his birth. And the head of Hawaii’s Health Department has stated that he reviewed pertinent documents and that Obama was certainly born in that state. So, those who believe Obama was born outside the United States, such as in Kenya, are simply out to lunch.”

So why the doubts? Because, said Ruddy, his “presidential historian” brother Dan had pointed out to him that, aside from the frontier-born Zachary Taylor and Andrew Jackson, no U.S. president had had a “disputed birth-site” (Dan had obviously missed out on the Chester Arthur controversy). Ruddy climaxed thus: “So, let me be clear. The issue over Obama’s birth certificate is not about President Obama’s citizenship. It is about his honesty and his promise to be the most transparent president ever. Releasing his birth certificate and other personal records that presidents have traditionally released to the public would go a long way toward bolstering those claims. P.S. I am listing below all of our presidents and details of their places of birth.”
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In this odd way, Ruddy had already pointed out two of the major objections to the Birthers’ stance. The first was that all the Hawaiian state officials, elected and appointed, who were asked about the birth certificate gave essentially the same reply. It was the state’s practice not to issue the long-form certificate, with all essential details having been transferred to computer files, to be generated on demand as Certifications of Live Birth. Still, they had inspected the original documents and attested that they conformed to the information on the certification.
^t
End of story.

The second objection was that, back in August 1961, two Hawaiian newspapers, the
Honolulu Advertiser
and the
Honolulu Star-Bulletin
, ran an identical birth announcement: “Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama, 6085 Kalanianaole Hwy., son, Aug. 4.” This announcement, apparently, wasn’t generated by the family, but by the state health department. Didn’t this leave the disingenuous Mr. Ruddy having to answer this question: Given these facts, why insist on the degrading (and therefore unlikely) spectacle of the country’s first black president having to go before the cameras to “prove” his Americanness, when his Hawaiian birth was corroborated by officials and unforgeable contemporary record? There is transparency, and then there is a perverse desire never to be satisfied.

The permanent dissatisfaction was evident in the succeeding blizzard of Birther minutiae that struck the Internet. Obama’s teenage mother, Stanley Ann Durham, had registered for a college course in Seattle ten days after the supposed date of birth of her son, and how likely was that? The address in the newspapers was discovered by sleuths to be one where the Obamas had never lived; it had been rented by Barack Obama’s maternal grand-parents and therefore might have been a fraudulent attempt to provide a Hawaiian address for a baby born elsewhere (the clear problem here being the health-department-generated announcements). As to the question of how the supposed birthplace forgers managed to have such prescience concerning the need, several decades later, to supply the infant with the credentials necessary for a run at the U.S. presidency, Birthers replied that perhaps the original object had simply been to furnish the boy—unhappily born abroad—with American citizenship.

The Farah and Corsi Show

Mainstream journalists in the United States and Europe receive all kinds of e-mails from PR companies and lobbyists promoting products, events, books, even arguments. During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, an “M. Sliwa” would send me—and hundreds of other writers—e-mails drawing our attention to various disobliging analyses of Barack Obama. My first, cursory thought was that M. Sliwa was a political lobbyist for someone supporting the Hillary Clinton campaign. When, however, the Democratic primaries were over and the e-mails kept coming, I began to think this was a Republican source. In the summer of 2009, I noticed that M. Sliwa was promoting the Birther cause.

M. Sliwa turned out to be Maria Sliwa, an ex-policewoman and—exotically—sister of the red-bereted New York Guardian Angel subway vigilante Curtis Sliwa. She was running a PR company in New York, serving a number of clients in various walks of life. I wrote to her and asked whether she would be willing to be interviewed on the subject of Birtherism. She replied that the best person to talk to was her client Joseph Farah, founder, editor, and CEO of the Internet news agency WorldNetDaily. Once based in Oregon, WND now had its offices near Washington, D.C., where about twenty employees mostly published medium-length pieces on its highly professional-looking site,
WND.com
. It also published books and sold related merchandise.

Farah was unwilling to be interviewed in person, but he agreed to discuss Birtherism over the telephone. He was persuasive and affable, with a hint of a laugh in much of what he had to say. The personality on the phone seemed to fit in with his most widely used publicity photograph: a handsome man with tanned skin and a black mustache, displaying a wide smile of very even white teeth.

He had first heard about the birth certificate issue, he told me, during the early part of the election campaign. “Obama is an unusual guy,” said Farah. “He lived in Indonesia, his father was a Kenyan, he was born in Hawaii—so there were a number of questions. . . . There were also no records from his university and college career. So what we knew about him was what we got in his autobiography—and that was the official version.” Even so, despite what Farah considered Obama’s “unusual” background, he did not focus on the question, nor did his agency, until one of its writers, Jerome Corsi, forced him to. “Jerry began talking about some of the unanswered questions, and about how no one knew anything about the birth—no doctors, no nurses, no living person—and it seemed implausible to me. That was late September, October 2008. And we didn’t get serious about it till just before the election.”

But when Farah got serious, he got serious. “Our focus shifted to activism. I considered this issue was so critical, because the country had taken a major step toward ignoring the constitution.” WND began to argue that the electoral college should not formally permit Obama’s election until it was “proved” that he was constitutionally eligible. WND was the source of the birth-certificate-seeking billboards and some of the bumper stickers.

Where, I asked, did Farah believe Obama had been born, if not in Hawaii? “I don’t know. I’d be very surprised if he was born in Kenya. We don’t know if he was born in the U.S., either. But you know, his mother gives birth to him in Hawaii and fourteen days later she’s in Seattle and Barack Obama, Senior, is in Honolulu. That’s not part of the official story. So you see these holes, and you say, What else is there? And all the other records, school and college, remain sealed.”

In Farah’s version, Obama becomes a man of almost impenetrable, perhaps dangerous mystery. What in another person’s past might seem fairly interesting questions for a committed biographer are translated here into the outward signs of something unhealthy. After all, if Obama is hiding things, then they can’t be good.

That there is more to Farah’s questioning than mere curiosity is given force when you know more about Jerry Corsi, his associate and employee, and author of “the
New York Times
number-one bestseller,”
The Obama Nation
, which could most kindly be described as a critical biography, published in 2008 with the admitted intention of opposing Mr. Obama’s candidacy. “
The Obama Nation
,” Farah mused, “I gave him the title of the book.” Being British and long in vowel, I hadn’t noticed the play on words before Farah pronounced the title. I was amazed, and Farah was amused. The title of a book about the U.S. president sounded—on purpose—like “The Abomination.” I wondered (though didn’t ask) whether Farah was aware of the meaning of the word.
Abomination
doesn’t connote something just undesirable or even hateful, but something loathsome or disgusting.

I turned to the book. Jerome Corsi is a soft-spoken, florid, round little man, who insists on being given his full title—Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D.—a Harvard qualification he wears like a knighthood. He has written many books, five of which have enjoyed the accolade “
New York Times
bestseller”—a more promiscuous category than many book buyers may realize. Two—
The Obama Nation
and the coauthored
Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry
—coincided with presidential election campaigns (2008 and 2004, respectively), and were unflattering about senior Democrats. Most of the others are, in effect, hugely extended paleoconservative opinion pieces, usually warning against some disaster about to befall America as a consequence of its politicians’ venality and lack of patriotism. These tomes include
The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada
;
Black Gold Stranglehold: The Myth of Scarcity and the Politics of Oil
;
Atomic Iran: How the Terrorist Regime Bought the Bomb and American Politicians
; and
Minutemen: The Battle to Secure America’s Borders.
In his columns for WND, Dr. Corsi opines on how the “wider Panama Canal would aid [the] Chinese,” on the global-warming “hoax,” and on whether “the dollar’s collapse [could] prompt a new currency.” (The last question was posed in 2006; the answer appears to have been in the negative.)

The claim for
The Obama Nation
, with its subtitle,
Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality
, was as a “definitive source for information on defeating Barack Obama—not by invective and general attacks, but by detailed and documented arguments that are well-researched and fact-based.” But an early flavor of how such research and how these facts were to be deployed could be gleaned from clues such as the title of Corsi’s third chapter: “Black Rage, Drugs and a Communist Mentor.”

Corsi builds a tower of insinuation, rather than fact, giving full weight to what other writers might consider incidental, and in so doing sends a series of signals to primitive sensors in the oldest and darkest parts of the white American brain. He makes sure that the reader notes an odd propensity of Obama’s white mother for nonwhite “mates,” first in the shape of Obama Sr. and then in Lolo Soetoro, young Barack’s Indonesian stepfather. Corsi mentions several times that Obama Sr. was a polygamous drunk. He repeatedly invokes signs that Obama sides with his “African blood” as a matter of preference, rather than as someone might who gradually discovers himself to be black. He strenuously overemphasizes the role of Islam in Obama’s early life, and then just as deliberately interprets Obama’s links to a Kenyan politician as favoring the pro-Islamization of Kenya. There are numerous errors of fact, all of which lead in broadly the same direction. The overall impact is to suggest that Obama is a foreigner who wishes, for atavistic reasons of his own, to undermine the old (white) USA. Obama is an abomination. If Corsi’s preoccupations have antecedents, they seem to be in the paranoias of the 1950s, which, as we’ve seen, fostered McCarthyism and which, at the cultural level, were visible in numerous films about alien infiltration and invasion. Corsi’s Obama is a political body-snatcher.

Naturally, in the early twenty-first century, it is unfashionable to wear such prejudices too openly, and fortunately the Internet provides opportunities to express them in more covert fashion. But not, perhaps, as covertly as everybody might like. After the publication of
The Obama Nation
, Corsi himself was the target of scrutiny, and it was discovered that in the recent past, while contributing to the website Free Republic, the doctor had delivered himself of some fruity opinions. “Isn’t the Democratic Party,” he had asked, “the official SODOMIZER PROTECTION ASSOCIATION of AMERICA?” Of Muslims he wrote: “RAGHEADS are Boy-Bumpers as clearly as they are Women-Haters—it all goes together.” “After he married TerRAHsa,” he demanded, “didn’t John Kerry begin practicing Judiasm [
sic
]? He also has paternal gradparents [
sic
] that were Jewish. What religion is John Kerry?” Kerry became “John F*ing Commie Kerry” in subsequent posts, while Mrs. Clinton was “Hellary,” the “fat hog,” who couldn’t keep “BJ Bill” satisfied. “Not lesbo or anything, is she?” Corsi speculated. There was much more in this vein.

Unfortunately for Corsi, several of his media appearances to promote the Obama book were plagued by the presence of liberal commentators who pointed out what lay behind his claims to dispassion. Corsi’s replies were peculiar examples of infantile evasion. “You haven’t mentioned all my apologies for those statements,” was his standard, slightly plaintive response, rather as a child might crossly insist that he had said he was sorry for hitting his sibling—while fully intending to do it again.
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