What Orly Taitz Believes

The head Birther talks about Obama's boyfriends, the long arm of Hugo Chavez and how the Web is rigged against her

By Gabriel Winant

Aug. 13, 2009

I'm on Skype with Orly Taitz, and from Israel the queen bee of the Birthers is telling me that Barack Obama had all his gay lovers rubbed out, Chicago-style. Well, that's not fair. Taitz isn't explicitly accusing Obama of clipping his boyfriends to shut them up. She just wants to make sure I know that a few homosexuals from Obama's church, oddly, mysteriously, ominously, wound up dead. "Now, I don't want to say that Obama did it," explains Orly, in her dense Moldovan accent. "I don't want to say that people close to Obama did it. But those are the facts."

Taitz drops this bomb an hour into our two-hour-plus conversation, by which point I have already staggered past surprise and wonder into woozy, weak-kneed unease. The gay murders are just one accusation in a bloody, Byzantine list as long as the Chicago white pages. And I have long since surrendered to Taitz's recitation of "facts," after feebly suggesting that the odds are long that the president is guilty of all these transgressions. Could she just pick one? Please? "It seems," I whimper, "as though you sort of throw everything against the wall to see what sticks." ...

Continued: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/08/13/orly_taitz/