More than 17,000 people had joined the social media effort aimed and removing real estate mogul and 2012 potential GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump as driver of the Indianapolis 500 pace car on the event’s 100th anniversary. Although support was slow at first, recent media reports of the group’s creation by Indianapolis attorney Michael Wallack produced a swell of attention Wednesday.

Speculation early Thursday was that officials with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway would be removing Trump as the official pace car driver, but once the news was made official, Trump said he was dumping the event because it could interfere with his other obligations.

A new pace car driver has not yet been announced. Fans are pushing several other celebrities as well as U.S. military personnel as possible replacements. Although a few have mentioned other politicians, there does not appear to be widespread support for anyone associated with politics.

Racing fans took exception to the selection of Trump after the New Yorker began voicing strong criticism of the certificate of live birth produced by President Barack Obama. In addition to the Facebook effort, a few religious-based organization such as an Indiana group of Baptist ministers had come out against Trump’s participation, voicing their opinion that the attacks against Obama’s birth are racially motivated.

“Nothing could be further from the truth,” Trump spokesman Michael Cohen told the IndyStar. “Donald Trump doesn’t have a racist bone in his body.”

Cohen contends that those who created the Facebook page and other movements against Trump were all Obama supporters.

“Obama has followed Mohammed, not the religious leader, but the boxer. President Obama has pulled off the perfect Mohammed Ali rope-a-dope,” Tancredo said in a release Friday underlining his alleged prescience on the birther conspiracy as a way to pitch his own radio show.

The release includes this exchange between Tancredo and Colmes last April:

TANCREDO: Now they very well may not want to show it because they want to propagate this whole thing that’s going on about birthers. … They may be doing it for that reason; I don’t know why they don’t want anyone to see it. … They want it propagated because you know –

COLMES: It makes your party look nuts!

TANCREDO: Yeah well maybe that’s why they don’t produce the document.

The president brought out his “long-form” birth certificate Wednesday, he said, to try to dampen discussion in the media about his citizenship, which has been called into question since before he was elected to office and which has generated a cottage industry on the right.

Conservative radio and blogs have hummed with the conspiracy for years. Believers bought billboard ads in cities around the nation demanding to know “Where’s the birth certificate?” Many birthers believe Obama was born in Kenya and that he has paid millions of dollars in a birth-certificate related cover up.

Mainstream Republican leaders have traded on the conspiracy to win favor with far-right voters.

Lat year, Colorado GOP Rep. Cory Gardner in his race to unseat Democrat Betsy Markey gave a typically equivocal response on the stump to a question from the crowd about Obama’s citizenship.

“Do you know for a fact if Barack Obama was born in the United States?” asked an audience member.

“Based on what they’ve shown, what they’ve tried to say, I think the administration is trying to say he was born in this country. I know what everybody else knows.”

Later, a Gardner spokesman told reporters that Gardner believes Obama is “most likely” a citizen.

Tancredo feels Obama the whole time was undertaking shrewd political strategery.

“Tancredo feels this has been nothing more than political covert operations,” said the release.

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“I, for one, believe that we should not be raising that issue in the sense that I think President Obama was born in the United States,” Pawlenty said Tuesday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program. “I’m not playing into that.”

Indeed, Obama was born in the U.S. and has released his birth certificate publicly. It’s available at a website Organizing for America set up, called FightTheSmears.com, and has been vetted by various news agencies and government officials.

Those critics who say the birth certificate isn’t good enough call for the “long-form birth certificate,” although what the President released is the same document accepted for a citizen to verify their status as native-born for virtually anything.

Pawlenty stopped short of saying Trump wasn’t a serious candidate, and instead adopted a “wait-and-see” approach on if Trump’s latest attempt to stir speculation of a presidential run will culminate in a campaign..

Trump has spent the past week making appearances on various television outlets questioning Obama’s birth certificate and even called for an investigation of Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D-HI).

Prior to Abercrombie’s election, his predecessor, Republican Linda Lingle, also vouched for Obama’s citizenship. A birth announcement also exists from a local Hawaiian newspaper.

“You know what I get a kick out of? The governor of Hawaii says, ‘Oh I remember when he was born 50 years ago.’ I doubt it,” Trump said Monday on Fox & Friends. “I think this guy should be investigated. I doubt he remembers when Obama was born. Give me a break.”

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Rumors have existed since the before the 2008 general election that Obama was foreign-born and, subsequently, would not be eligible to serve as President. Although the Obama campaign released a copy of his birth certificate, such rumors, fueled by a string of dismissed lawsuits, have persisted. Followers of the theory — known as birthers — have moderately few conscripts in the Midwest, yet just last fall copies of a bogus birth certificate were taped to store fronts in Cedar Rapids’ New Bohemia neighborhood.

Trump barreled into the controversy last week during an appearance on ABC’s The View.

During a telephone interview with “Fox & Friends” Monday morning, Trump once again implied that Obama had not released his actual birth certificate.

“Why can’t he produce a birth certificate?” asked Trump.

Video from the Monday morning exchange is reproduced below:

If they could, Americans would cut the power to the Capitol, throw everyone out and try to deport them. (Whereas I say: Anyone in Washington, D.C., who can produce an original copy of a valid U.S. birth certificate should be allowed to stay.)

It’s hard to figure out the joke there unless it’s about Obama’s citizenship. Just as Rush Limbaugh moved forward the “birther” conspiracy by joking about it on his show in 2008, Coulter has the power to yank this out of the fringes.

Orly Taitz in Nashville (Photo by David Weigel)

Taitz has a sort of media blackout policy on me — she has refused to talk since I posted a photo essay of the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot that featured, among other things, photos of her and of Third Reich memorabilia. Worse things can happen to journalists than being dissed by Orly Taitz — it saves a lot of time, and a lot of indulging a person who relentlessly brings up defunct or debunked legal arguments. But Taitz — who was recognized by quite a few people who stopped to shake her hand — did talk to other reporters, while hitting some speed bumps with others. For several minutes, she tried to make her case to Carl Cameron of Fox News, to no avail. As I spoke to John Avlon of The Daily Beast, Taitz ran over and asked Avlon when his book “Wingnuts” will be coming out and whether she could get a copy. (She’s profiled in the book.)

After he introduced the evening’s closing entertainment — a film titled “Generation Zero” — Breitbart walked outside to the convention hall. There, I heard Breitbart criticizing Farah, and briefly talked to him about it before I noticed that WorldNetDaily’s Chelsea Schilling was already talking to him, holding up a voice recorder. I backed up to allow her to continue her interview, which consisted of questions on why Breitbart didn’t think Obama’s citizenship was a legitimate issue.

“It’s self-indulgent, it’s narcissistic, it’s a losing issue,” Breitbart told Schilling. “It’s a losing situation. If you don’t have the frigging evidence — raising the question? You can do that to Republicans all day long. You have to disprove that you’re a racist! Forcing them to disprove something is a nightmare.”

“Wouldn’t you say,” asked Schilling, “in this case, that Farah is asking Obama to prove something rather than his disprove it?”

Breitbart rejected the premise. “When has a president ever been asked to prove his citizenship?”

After a few minutes Breitbart ended the conversation and Schilling started interviewing Tea Partiers about the speech, finding a little less skepticism. (I found some Tea Partiers, like Rita Grace of Virginia, who said they didn’t appreciate Farah’s speech.) I spotted Farah and asked him if his speech had been approved by Tea Party Nation.

“They asked me to speak,” said Farah. “They didn’t ask me, ‘What do you want to speak about?’ No, this operates like a free and open society, not like the kind of Marxist society you would apparently like to be a journalist for.”

I told Farah that his speech was getting negative attention already, and that Breitbart, who’d taken the stage after him, had criticized the “birther” parts of the speech. Farah shook his head and walked over to Breitbart in what seemed like an attempt to debunk my question.

“Andrew is my friend,” said Farah. “He has the right to disagree, and he has the right to say anything to a socialist newspaper that he wants. And if he wants to criticize his friend to you, and he’s dumb enough to do that…”

Breitbart raised his eyebrows. “I’m dumb to do what?”

“Criticize your friend to this socialist newspaper.”

“I was talking to her,” said Breitbart, pointing to Schilling. “I was talking to you. And I was saying that I disagreed on the birther stuff.”

“OK, well, did you know that Dave Weigel from The Washington Independent was”–

“I was talking to her,” said Breitbart. “She was asking me if I thought it was wise to bring it up, and I said, no. We have a lot of strong arguments to be making, and that is a primary argument. That is an argument for the primaries that did not take hold. The arguments that these people right here are making are substantive arguments. The elections in Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts were all won not on birther, but on substance. And to apply to this group of people the concept that they’re all obsessed with the birth certificate, when it’s not a winning issue–”

“It is a winning issue!”

“It’s not a winning issue.”

“It is! It becomes even more of a winning issue when the press abrogates its responsibility–”

“You don’t recognize it as a fundamentally controversial issue that forces a unified group of people to have to break into different parts? It is a schism of the highest order.”

“Nothing exposes the president’s–”

“Then prove it!”

“The press isn’t asking the question–”

“Prove it!”

“Prove what?”

“Prove your case.”

“I should prove, what, a birth certificate that may or may not exist?” Farah had gotten irritated. “That’s ridiculous. You don’t even understand the fundamental tenets of what journalism is about, Andrew. It’s not about proving things. It’s about asking questions and seeking truth.”

Breitbart tensed up after that insult. “Right.”

“I know you’re not a journalist, so that’s fine. But don’t diminish people who’ve been doing this for 35 years.”

“So you’re going to go on record saying that I’m not a journalist?”

“Are you? I’ve never heard you claim to be. Are you?”

“I’ll let it be answered by you.”

“Well, I knew Drudge didn’t consider himself a journalist, so I assumed that you were. … I don’t know, I’m not trying to insult you.”

“You did.”

At that point, Judson Phillips — who had spotted a very small crowd around us — walked into the fray and tried to simmer everyone down with a joke.

“I can give you absolutely conclusive and definitive proof that Obama’s birth certificate does not exist. How else do you explain why Joe Biden is vice president?”

That more or less ended the conversation — Farah moved on, and agreed to talk more about why he and WorldNetDaily continued to pursue stories on Obama’s citizenship. The citizenship issue had stuck around and taken off, he said, “because of us.” He ran stories asking questions about the issue — including stories that were quickly debunked — because the rest of the media wasn’t asking the questions.

“Do you think this has made my life easier, doing this?” asked Farah. “I used to be on TV all the time. I haven’t been on Fox News once since I started talking about this.”

Asked whether he thought his speech created any problems for Sarah Palin — prompting reporters to ask why she patronized a convention with rhetoric like this — Farah rejected the premise.

“Sarah Palin is a big girl,” he said. “She can take care of herself. I have a lot of confidence that she’ll take care of herself well. … My objective is not to get Sarah Palin elected or something. My job as a journalist is to seek the truth.”

Update: Here’s audio of the Farah-Breitbart dispute:

Click to play

Those comments got a positive reaction from the audience, but I felt Farah start to lose the room when he entered a long digression on how, in his view, there was more proof that Jesus Christ was born than proof that Obama was born in Hawaii. Farah moved on — but later, he joked that he couldn’t say how old Obama was “because he doesn’t have a birth certificate.” That got applause — and when he finished, he got a short standing ovation.

While one might have expected Washington to recover some civility after the mudslinging of the campaign season, the year instead saw the rise of the “just asking” paranoiac style on Fox News, the return of serial health care misinformer Betsy McCaughey, and the accusation “You lie!” hurled at the President as he addressed Congress. No untruths were more flagrant, pervasive or distracting, however, than the five listed here.

Click here to begin slideshow.

“Obviously, there is no political solution to it,” says Garrett. “Even if the entire Republican Party was united on the issue–”

He’s cut off by another constituent. “Have him show his birth certificate! It’s as simple as that! None of this ‘talk about it, talk about it’ — just let’s see the birth certificate!”

“I agree,” says Garrett — who’s not one of the 12 sponsors of the “birther bill.”

Video after the jump: