The death of World Net Daily editor Joseph Farah’s doubts about the legitimacy of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate has been greatly exaggerated.
In an interview with TPM, Farah confirmed he’s still on the “birther” crusade and said he might sue Esquire over a satirical article that said otherwise.
The magazine’s parody claimed that Farah was recalling the WND-published book Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President, by Dr. Jerome Corsi, and giving refunds to anyone who already purchased a copy.
“Don’t believe everything you read,” Farah said in an interview with TPM on Wednesday.
“The only hint at the parody was the made up name of Jerry’s book about the moon landing or something, and I had to do a double take and read it two or three times in astonishment before I even caught that,” Farah said.
“But judging from the response of our peers at Politico and the Daily Caller and all the other media calling me, I think that went right by a lot of folks,” Farah said. “And it certainly went by a lot of ordinary readers. I’ve been under siege here with people saying ‘Why are you going after Corsi! What are you doing?'”
Farah said he’s already exploring his legal options against the publication.
“Obviously if it was intended as a parody, it was not very well executed, and quite honestly I can tell you that I believe there’s some very real damage done by this article, and I’m exploring our legal options right now,” Farah said. “I think there are potentially some issues like restraint of trade and possibly libel, I think most people looked at that article and believed I actually said those words, that is a real problem for Esquire.”
Farah also said he no longer believes the title of Corsi’s book, Where’s the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President, is unfortunate because he’s “100 percent certain” that the long form birth certificate released by Obama a few weeks ago is a “fraudulent, bogus document.”
“We feel like Woodward and Bernstein in the early days of Watergate when nobody was reporting the story, and finally the New York Times came along,” Farah said.
He said the issue over Obama’s eligibility has never been limited to whether he was born in Hawaii, it’s been over whether he is a “natural born citizen,” which Farah contends he is not because his father wasn’t an American citizen. That reading of the law would have rendered other presidents ineligible, but none of that matters to Farah.
“I don’t care if there’s 26 American Presidents who got by breaking the constitutional requirements. I wasn’t alive for any of them, I promise you that. And if I had been, I would have done everything I’m doing right now to oppose them because I believe in the Constitution,” Farah said.
Esquire‘s Mark Warren wrote this update to their satire story:
UPDATE, 12:25 p.m., for those who didn’t figure it out yet, and the many on Twitter for whom it took a while: We committed satire this morning to point out the problems with selling and marketing a book that has had its core premise and reason to exist gutted by the news cycle, several weeks in advance of publication. Are its author and publisher chastened? Well, no. They double down, and accuse the President of the United States of perpetrating a fraud on the world by having released a forged birth certificate. Not because this claim is in any way based on reality, but to hold their terribly gullible audience captive to their lies, and to sell books. This is despicable, and deserves only ridicule. That’s why we committed satire in the matter of the Corsi book.
