When the birther movement was really starting to hit its stride over the summer, lawyer Orly Taitz was on the cable nets presented as a leading figure albeit in a fringe movement. But as the legal cases she’s pursued to declare Obama ineligible to be President have fallen apart and I’ve gotten a chance to see some of the pleadings she’s filed, I’ve started to wonder if her apparent prominence in the birther movement isn’t some big joke. Or maybe it just drives home how fringe these folks are.
In either case, her motions read like the whacked out inmate lawsuits I used to come across occasionally when I was practicing. A lot of them were written by hand, describing vast yet inexplicable conspiracies to keep them incarcerated, maybe with a mention of UFOs, and naming dozens if not hundreds of defendants, including most members of Congress. Taitz doesn’t go quite that far, but then again she’s actually a licensed member of the bar. I’ve sort of begun to feel sorry for her.
David Kurtz
David Kurtz is Managing Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of Talking Points Memo where he oversees the news operations of TPM and its sister sites.