They’re Baaack….

The fringe of the newly revitalized Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (VRC) achieved remarkable success in its first attack on Barack Obama yesterday. With the help of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, a VRC member in good standing, the fringers forced the nation’s highest court to waste 15 minutes of its valuable time deciding whether to hear evidence that Obama is not a bona fide citizen of the United States. As Buck noted soon afterward, the court refused to hear the case.
“This is the largest hoax perpetrated against the United States in 200 years.”
— Philip Berg, Obama conspiracy theorist
But as we learned during the Clinton era, the VRC always gets the last word — and nothing they say is true can ever be proved false. True to form, the fringers held a news conference in D.C. yesterday to let the world know that their fight against Obama ain’t over, not hardly — and WaPo’s Dana Milbank was there:

“This is the largest hoax perpetrated against the United States in 200 years,” Philip Berg declared in a news conference at the National Press Club. His colleagues delivered the further news that “Barack Obama is the most notorious criminal in the history of this planet” and that the president-elect’s claim to be a natural-born American has “the potential to propel our nation into a time of great peril,” a time of “widespread chaos, disturbances to public tranquillity.”

Berg, a Pennsylvania lawyer and the author of another lawsuit alleging that Obama is not native-born, and therefore is not eligible to be president, sought to establish several facts. One: “He knows he was adopted in Indonesia.” Two: “He was born in Kenya.” Three: “His real name would be Barry Soetoro.” Four: “If he didn’t go through immigration, believe it or not Barack Obama would be an illegal alien today.” And five: “If and when the right court handles this matter, Barack Obama” and everybody around him “should really be tried criminally and many of them should go to jail.”

Obama’s birth certificate has been verified by Hawaiian authorities and non-partisan fact-checkers — all of which was a complete waste of time as far as the VRCers are concerned. “That document is a forgery, it’s a fraud, just like Barack Obama is,” Berg told reporters yesterday, according to Milbank. “His birth certificate will indicate he was born in Kenya.”

Also on hand at the presser was Bob Schulz, operator of a right-wing foundation, who warned Milbank and the other reporters that the United States is threatened by creeping authoritarianism:

“We have an emerging police state … Our Republic cannot and will not long survive … This nation is headed toward a vortex of a constitutional crisis.” In Schulz’s view, Obama must “act honorably and relieve the nation of this escalating constitutional crisis.” And if not, Schulz will call his own constitutional convention. “The people must act as the final arbiters of the Constitution,” he said.

Schulz must have been in a coma for the past eight years and thus missed Bush’s torturing of suspects, spying on U.S. citizens and other police-state tactics.

Factcheck.org, one of the nonpartisan groups that verified the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate, also pointed to an announcement of Obama’s birth that was published in the Honolulu paper in 1962, via Milbank in the Post:

“Of course, it’s distantly possible that Obama’s grandparents may have planted the announcement just in case their grandson needed to prove his U.S. citizenship in order to run for president someday,” FactCheck.org judged. “We suggest that those who choose to go down that path should first equip themselves with a high-quality tinfoil hat.”

It is tempting to laugh these guys off as howler monkeys tossing their poo, but for anyone who was paying attention 16 years ago during the transition from Bush I to Clinton, the tone of their bizarre charges has a disquieting ring of familiarity.

No one took the VCRers seriously during Clinton’s first term as they nattered on about his failed land deals and bimbo eruptions, but a few years later they managed to get Clinton on the hot seat via the Krakatoa of bimbo eruptions. A network of VRC-affiliated legal “elves” funneled information about Clinton’s secret affair with Monica Lewinsky to lawyers for Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee who was suing Clinton for sexual harassment over an alleged incident when he was governor. Jones’ lawyers used the information about the affair to set a perjury trap, which Clinton walked right into.

The president’s lie under oath about Lewinsky during the Jones civil lawsuit deposition led to his impeachment in 1999 — which, in turn, hobbled the campaign of his vice president, Al Gore, ultimately leading to the selection of George Bush as president by the Supreme Court just eight long years ago this month.

Keeping in mind how rumors of bimbo eruptions in 1992 flowered into a presidential impeachment in 1999 and paved the way for the ascent of George W. Bush in 2000, it’s probably smart not to ignore the tin-foil hatters’ charges that Obama is the planet’s most notorious criminal and the rest — especially since they have apparently convinced Justice Antonin Scalia, a VRC fellow traveler, to put another challenge to Obama’s citizenship on the Supreme Court docket for Dec. 12.