Taking Credit For Teh Crazie

Joseph Farah, founder, editor and CEO of the most profoundly wingnutty World Net Daily, has taken credit for the recent resurgence in the profoundly wingnutty "Birth Certificate" conspiracy theory.

In his latest column, Farah is looking for money to continue a national billboard campaign - one where he asks the question "Where's the birth certificate?":

Ask yourself this question: What else, besides this campaign, could possibly have been responsible for the outburst of talk, discussion, debate, controversy, snide comments and media coverage of Barack Obama's eligibility issue in the last five weeks? I think it's clear that this very low-budget media campaign, stifled, as it were, by three of the largest communications companies controlling billboards, has made an enormous and surprising impact on the national debate.

Am I right or wrong about that?

There have been newspaper stories about the campaign. There have been cable TV newscasts about the campaign. There have been talk-radio shows discussing the eligibility issue that have never before broached the topic. The Internet is abuzz with debate.

This was pretty much a dead issue before I launched this billboard campaign. Now it's alive again.

And he's using the issue to, surprise surprise surprise, raise money:

And before I get back to the subject of Barack Obama's birthday, I want to try to set the record straight on a misunderstanding that, I believe, has severely hampered the campaign in recent days.

While it's true that CBS, Clear Channel and Lamar Advertising have all banned this campaign nationwide, that does not spell the end of this effort – far from it. There is no shortage of billboards to acquire for this campaign. There are literally hundreds of thousands available to us through other major providers and through independent companies eager to work with us.

But this misunderstanding that we've somehow been shut out of advertising has resulted in a precipitous drop in contributions toward the billboard campaign. While we have a few more billboards on their way, we've had to stop our aggressive pursuit of more because the money has all but dried up.

Aw, geez.

I know I haven't mentioned this in a while, but World Net Daily actually published this last August:

However, FactChecker.org says it obtained Obama's actual birth certificate and that the document was indeed real. The site discredited some of the claims of Internet bloggers, such as that the certificate as viewed in a scanned copy released by Obama's campaign lacked a raised seal. FactChecker.org also established that many of the alleged flaws in the document noted by bloggers were caused by the scanning of the document.

A separate WND investigation into Obama's birth certificate utilizing forgery experts also found the document to be authentic. The investigation also revealed methods used by some of the bloggers to determine the document was fake involved forgeries, in that a few bloggers added text and images to the certificate scan that weren't originally there.

I forget if Farah has denounced his own website. Does anyone know?

Teh Crazie continues...