Obama's Birth Certificate ??

Why won’t Michele Bachmann come clean about her views on President Obama’s birth certificate? For a congresswoman who flaunts suspicions about the U.S. Census, foreign currencies, the Federal Reserve and Obama’s allegedly “anti-American views,” she’s been strangely silent on the rampant (and roundly disproven) rumor spread by so-called “birthers” that Obama was born outside the United States.

Bachmann isn’t yet, for example, counted among the 10 Republican co-sponsors of U.S. Rep. Bill Posey’s H.R. 1503, a bill requiring presidential candidates to provide copies of their birth certificates. But a lot of her friends are, as Daniel Nichanian at Campaign Diaries points out:

Interestingly, [U.S. Reps. Dan] Burton and [Kenny] Marchand’s [sic] addition to the list means that a majority of the Posey bill’s sponsors are now also co-sponsors of Michele Bachmann’s paranoid foreign currency-banning constitutional amendment (the other 3 are Posey, [U.S. Reps. Marsha] Blackburn and [John Abney] Culberson). We are here talking about the congressmen who are closest to movement conservatives.

(Nichanian may mean to say that half the sponsors of the birther bill also back Bachmann’s, but that’s still a swell segment.)

Bachmann’s fans, such as one who left this comment at Bachmann’s YouTube channel, are begging her to probe the whereabouts of Obama’s birth certificate:



She’s ordinarily got an appetite, not a weak stomach, when it comes to her fans’ more fringey causes. In a video from a recent Minnesota Republican gathering, she finds common cause with a group pushing DVDs about “The Obama Deception” and 9/11 controlled-demolition conspiracies that make former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman shy away.

You’d think a foreign correspondent like Bachmann would be as interested in the problem of foreign U.S. presidents as she is in the problem of foreign cats and dogs. U.S. funds being spent on domesticated animals that, well, aren’t domestic is a pet peeve of Bachmann’s from her first term. She was still bitching about it last Friday on local radio, straying from the topic of health care reform:

We voted on a bill that would send millions of dollars to foreign countries to pay for foreign cats and foreign dogs. … Then the next day, as if that was to add insult to injury, we voted on another bill that spent millions on foreign birds in foreign countries.

David Weigel, a reporter at our sister site The Washington Independent, has been tracking birtherism closely. Asked if he has seen signs of any Bachmann involvement in the birther movement, Weigel says “Not yet.”