Below The Beltway

It looks like Lou Dobbs’ ratings drop has also caused his credibility to disappear:

This week, the birthers — the movement that believes President Obama is not a natural-born citizen of the U.S. and thus not eligible to be president — have gone mainstream, and in a big way. That’s due in part to a YouTube video of a woman shouting at Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., about Obama’s birth certificate. It’s also the work of CNN’s Lou Dobbs, who’s apparently found yet another conspiracy theory to love.

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From the beginning of his coverage, Dobbs has been repeating a familiar trope of the birthers and their supporters: If Obama would just release his real birth certificate, the long form rather than the certification of live birth he made public last year, then all of this would be over.

“I believe Barack Obama is a citizen of the United States, folks, don’t you? But I do have a couple of little questions, like you. Why not just provide a copy of the birth certificate? That’s entirely within the president’s power to do so. Then all of this nonsense goes away,” Dobbs said on his radio show Tuesday. “One would think the president would want to get rid of this nonsense. But he doesn’t. And so none of us knows what the reality is.”

But Dobbs knows that the crowd of conspiracy theorists he’s now supporting won’t be placated that easily. When he brought Keyes and Taitz on his show, he mentioned that he’d asked Taitz, off-air, whether the release of a long form birth certificate would satisfy her. “She said no,” Dobbs told his audience, and then directed the question to her again. “Both parents have to be citizens in order to satisfy the requirements of natural-born citizen,” Taitz responded. In other words, for the de facto leader of the movement, her questions can never go away, because Obama’s father was a British citizen at the time of his son’s birth.

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Dobbs himself says he’s learned a lot about birth certificates and the whole issue from Taitz and Keyes. And that raises a question: With other CNN hosts having offered the actual facts on the air — Pilgrim even attributed the debunking to the network itself — why is Dobbs allowed to go on and make these false claims, without any hint of opposition? For now, CNN’s not saying.

Of course, they didn’t say much of anything when he went off on his illegal immigrants bringing leprosy to the United States rant a few years ago, so that’s not entirely surprising.