A particular figure has gained some traction in the conservative blogosphere lately.  That man's name is Philip J. Berg, and he is a lawyer.

Now, to those singularly obsessed with the "birth certificate" issue, two basic truths seem to play a hand in this.  One is that they obviously never see natural sunlight. The other, and equally important, is they don't really care who this man is, provided of course that he is against Obama and gives their cause some play in the media.  Berg has met this criteria reasonably well.  What some don't seem to realize is this guy's actual history.

The first thing of note is that, before becoming obsessed with taking out Obama, Berg was obsessed with taking out BUSH.  That's right.  Phil was pretty mad about the 2000 election, and perhaps rightly so.  In 2001, he sought to remove all the Supreme Court justices that had voted in Bush's favor in the famous Bush v. Gore case.

Of course, Berg didn't stop there.  You see, he is a rampant 9/11 conspiracy theorist.  His ranting can be easily found online, as such:  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5255032592388273934

As such, Berg filed a lawsuit against Bush and 154 others alleging that they had conspired to bring about the attacks that day. Despite a lack of real evidence, Berg pursued it with zeal, only, as in the case of his previous suit, to see it completely rejected in court.  As with his more recent Obama suits, Berg re-filed this suit only to have it rejected again.

Berg's bad behavior as a lawyer doesn't stop with conspiracies, though: unlike the suits he had filed, Berg himself was successful sued for malpractice by former clients 2005.  That's right.  In a lawsuit pertaining to ERISA (Employment Retirement Income Security Act), Berg had apparently failed to file a response to a complaint in the suit, resulting in his clients having a default judgement entered them.  These former clients decided to sue Berg for malpractice and won the case; the judge found that Berg's own charge of fraud "was inadequately pled, not grounded in fact, time-barred, and utterly irrelevant to the pending malpractice action against him."  In the end, Berg was fined $10,000 and forced to spend a little time in ethics training.  The whole case can be found here: http://www.paed.uscourts.gov/documents/opinions/05D0679P.pdf

This is the guy websites like "RepubX" have recently decided to align themselves with.  This, ironically, is also the sort of guy radical leftists were aligning themselves with not long ago.  He represents the problem with using a lawsuit as "proof" for a case's legitimacy; Berg himself has, consistently and constantly, proven not only his own cases but his very strategies and lawyerly ethics to be illegitimate.  As well, he's consistently and on multiple occasions proved what reasonable people already know.

That most conspiracy theorists are nuts.