Syndicated columnist and author Diana West tackles the media taboo on the subject of the serious evidence that President Obama presented to the nation an electronically-created document purporting to be his actual birth certificate. In "Silence of the Lapdogs," she writes:

Warning: This column contains news of evidence of possible forgery and fraud in the long-form birth certificate of the president of the United States and - bonus - his Selective Service registration card.

I figure the warning is necessary to prevent Americans, particularly Americans who work in news media and politics, from hurting themselves on any hard, sharp facts that might poke through my discussion of what is surely the biggest scandal to emerge around the seemingly dodgy docs Barack Obama is using to verify his identity.

I refer to the logic- and history-defying news and political blackout of the March 1 press conference called in Maricopa County, Ariz., by Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Cold Case Posse.

I ask you: Have you read in your local paper about the technical evidence that led the posse's three retired criminal investigators and two attorneys to conclude that the birth certificate image White House officials uploaded at the White House website on April 27, 2011, did not originate in a paper format, but rather was created (forged) as an electronic file on a computer?

It is not merely the mainstream media, but also much of the conservative media which enforces the taboo on discussion of the evidence that the President of the United States has, for unknown reasons, decided to fiddle with the record of his birth.  She quotes one leading conservative editor:

"It's an issue on which people are being marginalized very easily and very quickly at this point."

Marginalized by whom? The Soros-funded attack machine? The liberal-dominated "mainstream media"? Fox News-dominated conservative media? The Obama White House?

Clearly, something has us all on lockdown. That's much, much scarier than even the amazing possibility that some con artist might be pulling off the biggest scam in history.

One person who is not intimidated by the threat of marginalization is Lord Christopher Monckton, who has become perhaps the world's leading global warming skeptic. If he were worried about what others would think of him, he would not have endured the years of scorn accorded global warming skeptics.

On Dennis Miller's radio show Thursday Lord Christopher Monckton, a former policy adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and an activist against global warming "alarmism," went all-in on questioning President Barack Obama's citizenship.

Monckton, the 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, hinted about his position on the issue in April 2010 at a tea party rally on the National Mall near the White House. But on Miller's show, he said the birth certificate issue was far more important that combatting so-called anthropogenic global warming.

"I mean, hey you got a president who has a false birth certificate on the Internet, on the White House website," Monckton said. "It's not even clear where he was born. You've got a national debt which is rising into the stratosphere. You've got unemployment certainly here in California at 11 percent, 50 percent in the construction industry. These are real problems. You've got real environmental problems - overfishing, deforestation, pollution, not so much in the west but certainly in other countries. These are real problems which ought to be addressed. You've got poverty. You've got disease. These are again serious problems in Africa for instance, that we could be helping with. But no, we're obsessed with making the rich even richer and making the absolute bankers richer still by going for global warming and cap-and-trade and other nonsenses of this kind."

Ms. West is courageous, because as a syndicated columnist, her livelihood depends ont he good will of the very media she criticizes. For some people, the truth is more important than personal advantage.

One does not have to believe that Obama was born in Kenya to be disturbed by the evidence of a digitally-constructed birth certificate being passed off as authentic by a president. Those who are more worried about their public image and about being attacked by the media and political establishment than about getting at the truth will in the end be judged  by their actions. Facts are facts, and Sheriff Joe's cold case posse has come up with facts that will not be silenced or controverted by social pressure.

History will render its verdict on Obama, his critics, and his defenders.