Birthers and the 3 Card Monte
Editor: Republished with permission of The Post & Email.
AND WHAT TO DO BEFORE IT GETS HERE…

by William Lolli, ©2011

(Mar. 15, 2011) — Back in 1975 I was stationed at Clark AB, Republic of the Philippines. When a new, wet-behind-the-ears Airman arrived from the States, the base had a protocol to prepare the “kids” to recognize and resist the dangers of living overseas. We received graphic briefings on the local bars, entanglements with hookers, dangerous social diseases, the black-marketing of American goods and the tricks gamblers and con-men would use to allure naive GIs.

One of those con-game schemes was the 3 Card Monte. In this game, a card shark would try to get the GI [the "Mark"] to bet on how well he can guess which of 3 shuffled cards is, say, the queen. With the use of planted assistants ["Shills"] in the fake crowd around the game, the “Mark” is made to believe that he can win. But he can’t and he doesn’t.
Efforts that Failed

In the past three years, the Birthers have come a long way. At first we started as single individuals, feeling and thinking that something about the shortcomings of information about the origins of Barack Obama was disturbing.

Time moved forward. The individual concerns grew into efforts to find the truth. Before long it became obvious that the press and politicians were not interested in Obama’s origins, much less any Constitutional eligibility issues. Across the US and still unknown to each other, the individuals began to form groups and those groups made inquiries. FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] requests were filed, representatives’ offices in state and federal governments were visited, letters were written. But the efforts yielded nothing.

When it became apparent that the stonewalling did not stop the inquiries, both the requesters and the deniers escalated the rhetoric and the actions taken: Those in the press and government that supported the denials of access to information called those seeking information “the Birthers” and labeled them as kooks. Those seeking information began to file lawsuits.

As with any movement that starts as a loose collection of individuals, the kooks did emerge, and the press took full advantage. But the message: “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” could not be shaken and took hold in the public lexicon. The public polls have shown over the past three years that numbers of people recognize that Obama was never vetted and that access to his history is still being denied.
Attempts at the Federal and State Levels

However, over the same period the “Birthers” were systematically locked out of every federal court district– not on merit– but on an expansion of the doctrine of Standing, which now through repeated precedent rulings has created a new, insurmountable barrier for citizens to hold any federal office-holder accountable for any national, Constitutional violation of law.

The efforts to obtain resolution through the various state court systems met with equal failure; but the lawsuits revealed that many states had weaknesses in their election laws that prohibited their Secretaries of State from possessing the investigative and enforcement powers necessary to uphold the Constitutional requirements of Article II, Section 1.

Thanks to the efforts of Barnett, Kreep, Keyes and others, CA Secretary of State Bowen actually won her case arguing that a writ of mandamus could not be enforced upon her [a legal order to force her do her job in validating a candidate] by citing the fact that California Election Code did not give her the power to do so. Other states’ Secretaries of State followed suit, making the same claim. Thus efforts at the state level also resulted in failure.
Other Efforts and the 2010 Change

More clever and original approaches were as equally unsuccessful, such as the Manning “trials” and the attempts to use legally arcane “presentments” to force the jurisprudential powers into action. Although valiantly destructive to his military career, the loss of Lt. Col. Lakin in courts martial was devastating in that it showed that even in a criminal case, access to evidence would be denied.

The new Republican wins in November 2010 have done little to change the situation. The political calculations have been tabulated: The government has decided that to question Obama’s credentials would be tantamount to opening Pandora’s Box—risking catastrophic political and economic damage if he is truly found ineligible.

So that leaves the movement asking the same question the public is asking: “Where’s the Birth Certificate?”
Now to the Birther 3 Card Monte:

The so-called blunder of Hawaiian Governor Abercrombie in January 2011 of publicly seeking a way to make Obama’s Long Form Birth Certificate available to the public was no accident. Nor was the forced resignation of Dr. Neal Palafox, the well-respected physician Abercrombie had chosen to replace Chiyome Fukino.

Abercrombie floated a trial balloon. The press, the Birthers and WND all took the bait. The Dealer had “opened the gate” to the card game, and everybody rushed in. If there was a blunder, it was the initial appointment by Abercrombie of Palafox to the post.

It is my opinion that once Abercrombie found out that Palafax was a man of integrity, he had to go. Palafox would have ruined the game, revealing that the Dealer was a cheat. As it stands now, the entire Department of Health is left with no head, no accountability, and under the direct charge of department bureaucrats.

The setup for the 3 Card Monte is now in place for the 2012 election cycle:

As alluded earlier, Abercrombie is the Dealer. The missing card is the COLB Long Form Birth Certificate. The general public has become the Marks. And the naïve Birthers and the mainstream press are the Shills, egging-on the Dealer to flip the card over and show it to us.

And we will be shown, alright, at a time of the Dealer’s choosing in the 2012 election cycle as candidate Obama makes a big-splash, full-core press event of registering as a 2012 official candidate.

The Dealer will turn over the card and – what do you know—Obama was born in Hawaii after all.

Result: The Birthers are made to look like kooks again, the public dismisses the whole Birther story, Constitutional questions are ignored, the WND billboards come down, and Obama is up ten points in the polls.

How can this 3 Card Monte be stopped? The answer is simple: The Birther Movement must unite as quickly as possible to secure state laws requiring credential validation and investigative authority to as many states’ Secretaries of State as they can.

If the Obama crowd can, year after year, get dead people to vote in Chicago, then it is no big deal to submit as authentic a forged long form COLB.

Birthers need as many Secretaries of State as can be attained to be empowered with forensic investigative authority to determine the authenticity of any document submitted as genuine. Simply passing laws requiring a birth certificate be shown is not enough. There MUST be legal language giving power to validate the documentation in order to prevent the submission and acceptance of forged credentials.

Consider this: If laws such as these had been in place in 2008, the outcome of Keyes v Bowen would have been vastly different. CA Secretary of State Bowen would have been forced by law to do her job, and the truth would have become known about candidate Obama.

I fear this is the last stand for the Birthers. If we cannot enact these laws, then our efforts to get to the truth are finished.

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William Lolli is a regular columnist for SanDiego.com. His latest columns with that publication can be found here and here. SanDiego.com chose not to publish his series on the “Birthers” but granted permission for them to be published at The Post & Email. His bio can be found here.