Once upon a time, the main alternative to the dreaded mainstream media was the fillings in our teeth. When I was a kid, scarcely a month went by without a story of somebody, somewhere, picking up secret 
messages on their fillings. The CIA, the KGB, space aliens, the emergency medical team tending the comatose John F. Kennedy in a secret basement room of Parkland Memorial Hospital -- they all transmitted their radio traffic on frequencies that was no match for American dental technology. Of course, some tyrannical forces tried to turn our fillings against us. I remember reading about some poor old man who was chasing down Kate Jackson, one of the original Charlie's Angels, to make her stop broadcasting threatening messages to his teeth. (There was a reason why everybody always said Kate was the smart Angel.)
These days, you no longer need to develop cavities to get messages from outer space. You can just tune in Lou Dobbs, either on CNN or his daily radio talk show. His weird obsession with Barack Obama's birth certificate is reaching Martian proportions.
The claim that Obama is a secret Kenyan or Indonesian or whatever who has used a fake birth certificate to pose as an American goes back to the Democratic primaries of 2008, when supporters of Hillary Clinton first made the claim. It's been rebutted a million times a million times, not just by independent websites like Politifact.com but CNN itself.
The basis for the suspicion is that Hawaii, like many other states, is digitizing its records, and what Obama usually displays is the new digital form. But every relevant state official in Hawaii has sworn that it's valid. Even more to the point, researchers have found birth announcements for Obama published in the Honolulu newspapers in 1961. If the Illuminati were already hatching a conspiracy to get him fraudulently elected president 48 years ago, we're doomed anyway.
Nonetheless, the birth-certificate conspiracy theory still lives on the far fringes of the Internet...and on 
Dobbs' shows. For the past week, prompted by a trumped-up lawsuit by a soldier trying to get out of serving in Iraq on the basis that Obama's presidency is illegitimate, Dobbs has been hammering away on the theme of the birth certificate. Citing the evidence that he's wrong has only prompted Dobbs to lash out at "certain quarters of the national liberal media that are just absolutely trying to knock down the issue of President Obama's birth certificate," which are "focused on being subservient and servile to this presidency rather than being inquisitive and doing their jobs with, you know, the White House."
Well, I've never been accused of "subservient and servile" to Obama, but I think this is silly. The case against Obama's birth certificate, which was never very strong -- how many Americans have their original birth certificate? I certainly don't have mine -- was laid to rest long ago, when the birth announcements in the Honolulu newspapers were discovered. For Dobbs to raise it again, a year later, at best smacks trying to summon viewers (or listeners) with smoke and noise rather than substance. At worst, it's a right-wing version of the stupid, pointless and ad hominem attacks on Sarah Palin's supposed cover-up of the true parentage of her baby, another vicious canard that should be buried in a deep grave. Obama and Palin's enemies should confront them on the issues, of which there are plenty, and not from news flashes they got from their fillings.
