The plain truth will never mollify a Truther. There's always a convoluted excuse -- some inconsequential discrepancy to seize on, some photographic "evidence" to magnify into a blur of meaningless pixels -- that will rationalize irrationality. Palin could produce Trig's umbilical cord and it still wouldn't be enough.

Alas, Trutherism thrives on both the left and right. Which brings us to the spate of lawsuits challenging President-elect Barack Obama's U.S. citizenship. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court considers one of those suits, filed by New Jersey citizen Leo Donofrio, who maintains that Obama is not a "natural born citizen" because his father held British citizenship.

There may be the seed of a legitimate constitutional issue to explore here -- how is the citizenship requirement enforced for presidential candidates, anyway? And at least Donofrio concedes that Obama was born in Hawaii. But a dangerously large segment of the birth-certificate hunters have lurched into rabid Truther territory. The most prominent crusader against Obama's American citizenship claim, lawyer Philip Berg (who, not coincidentally, is also a prominent 9/11 Truther) disputes that Obama was born in Hawaii and claims that Obama's paternal grandmother told him she saw Obama born in Kenya.

Berg and his supporters further assert that the "Certification of Live Birth" produced by Obama was altered or forged. They claim that the contemporaneous announcement in a Hawaii newspaper of Obama's birth is insufficient evidence that he was born there. (Did a fortuneteller place it in the paper knowing he would run for president?) And they accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being part and parcel of the grand plan to install Emperor Obama and usurp the rule of law.

I believe Trig was born to Sarah Palin. I believe Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. I believe fire can melt steel and that bin Laden's jihadi crew -- not Bush and Cheney -- perpetrated mass murder on 9/11. What kind of kooky conspiracist does that make me?