Larry Bailey
The downside of being a birther: Your colleagues may think you're a nut. The upside: It brings in the dough.
In the three days since former Navy SEAL Larry Bailey told Foreign Policy Magazine he was a birther, his anti-Obama group Special Operations Speaks has seen a "big" spike in fundraising, according to the former Navy captain.
[See: Photos of Navy SEALs]
"I'm taking some hits from our people for identifying myself as a birther," says Bailey, who reiterated his belief to Whispers that President Obama was not born in the United States. "But it seems to have struck a chord for people who want to help."
Bailey says 800 new contributors signed on in the days since his birther admission.
The money, he says, will be used to finance SOS's efforts to portray Obama as anti-military, including allegations that the Obama administration has allowed military leaks, and criticism the president has unfairly taken credit for the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
A similar anti-Obama SEAL group called OPSEC released a documentary last week with the same message. But Bailey says the two groups are not working together.
"They are fighting the air war, while we're doing the ground war," Bailey told Whispers. "They're on TV, and we're on the ground."
The White House released Obama's long-form Hawaii birth certificate in April 2011, a move that cut the number of Americans who doubted the president's origins in half, according to a Washington Post poll. Only 1 percent of Americans at present claim to have "solid evidence" Obama was born outside of America, as Bailey does.
Despite being well in the minority view—even among hardcore Republicans—Bailey isn't letting up on the President.
"We are in a war with Barack Obama," he wrote in a Monday fundraising E-mail, which asks for donations of upwards of $250,000. "We absolutely MUST remove that anti-American machine from power."
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Elizabeth Flock is a staff writer for U.S. News & World Report. You can contact her at eflock@usnews.com or follow her on Twitter and Facebook.
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