Below The Beltway

The Supreme Court may have turned down the first two cases to reach it alleging that Barack Obama was ineligible to be President, but, as Dana Milbank notes, the coalition of the crazy was undeterred at the National Press Club yesterday:

A unanimous Supreme Court announced yesterday morning that it would not take up a case making the improbable claim that Barack Obama is a secret foreigner.

A dissenting opinion came out in the afternoon.

“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.”

Uh, and what about that birth certificate showing he was born in Honolulu, a fact confirmed by the Hawaii Health Department and validated by independent groups?

“That document is a forgery, it’s a fraud, just like Barack Obama is,” Berg bellowed. “His birth certificate will indicate he was born in Kenya.”

And Berg the 9/11 Truther may have been the sanest person at the press conference:

The presentation was hosted by Bob Schulz, who runs the We the People Foundation and has run ads in the Chicago Tribune claiming that Obama — “the usurper,” as Schulz calls him — is ineligible to be president.

(…)

Schulz was equipped with other pieces of hysteria, among them: “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.

As I noted last week, these people and the people who believe them aren’t going to be convinced by rational argument. They believe what they believe, and any evidence they are presented with that contradicts what they believe is merely another strand in an ever-vaster conspiracy.

It’s the same mentality of the people who believe that Bill Clinton ran drugs out of Mena, Arkansas and the United Nations was flying black helicopters around the country back in the 1990’s, the same mentality who believe that the government is covering up long-term contact with extraterrestrials, and the same people who believe that the government was complicit in the 9/11 attacks. There’s no point in arguing with them, so you may as well just ridicule them.