Below The Beltway

For the third night in a row, Chris Matthews spent time talking about the “birthers,” this time choosing to subject G. Gordon Liddy, who apparently has bought into the birther lies, to the Hardball onslaught.

It wasn’t pretty:

If nothing else, Liddy shows what happens to all birthers when confronted with actual evidence; they have no idea how to respond.

However, one point Liddy raised does need to be addressed, and that is the assertion that Obama’s Grandmother, Sarah Obama, said in a telephone interview (Liddy incorrectly states that it was in a deposition, that is not true) that she was present when Obama was born in Kenya. As David Weigel noted in an article that was published before Inauguration Day, this assertion is based on a willfully incomplete reading of the transcript of the telephone call:

On Oct. 16, an Anabaptist minister named Ron McRae called Sarah Hussein Obama, the president-elect’s 86-year-old paternal step-grandmother, at her home in Kenya. Two translators were on the line when McRae asked if the elder Obama was “present” when the president-elect was born. One of the translators says “yes.” McRae contacted Berg and gave him a partial transcript of the call with a signed affidavit. He opted not to include the rest of the call, in which he asks the question more directly—”Was he born in Mombassa?”—and the translators, finally understanding him, tell him repeatedly that the president-elect was born in Hawaii.

Further details about what Sarah Obama actually said, including a translated transcript of the phone call can be found here.

On some level, watching Liddy be reduced to a quivering pile of jello was painful, but if it moved us closer to the overall goal of completely discrediting this lie, it was worth it.

Update: Over at Salon’s War Room, Alex Koppelman explains that no, Obama’s Grandmother didn’t say he was born in Kenya