Over the weekend birther/conspiracist/ lawyer/dentist/ real estate agent/ wingnut Orly Taitz rolled out a document that she claimed was a birth certificate showing Barack Obama was born in Mombassa, Kenya.
The document was on obvious forgery. Perhaps the best critique of the document was posted here on DailyKos in the excellent comment by CatM that was frontpaged by kos on Sunday as Debunking the unbearably stupid.
The 3rd point on the list is "Mombasa belonged to Zanzibar when Obama was born, not Kenya." This is, however, factually misleading. (As kos himself stated in his posting "some of these bullet points may turn out to be misfires.")
This was given more attention last night when both Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow specially cited the "Mombassa was part of Zanzibar" issue as a major part of their ridiculing of the forged document, treating it as fact. Before everyone latches onto this one factually incorrect argument as a central part of our critique of the forged document, I'd like offer a bit of historical review and perspective.