[Update: The Air Force says Moran isn’t AWOL after all, but rather on approved leave status as he awaits discharge.]
An Air Force staff sergeant based in Germany says he’s been AWOL since last week because he read on the Internet that President Barack Obama’s long form birth certificate is a fraud.
Inspired by fellow birther, Army doctor Terrence Lakin, Staff Sgt. Daryn J. Moran has plastered the Internet with the news that he’s deserting his post as an ophthalmology technician overseas.
“In identifying [Obama] as my enemy and proclaiming him to be the enemy of the entire country, I squarely place myself in the same situation as himself,” Moran says in a video posted by a birther website.
“The reason I no longer obey the Commander-in-Chief is not because he’s Black, but because he has no credible proof that he is an American,” Moran wrote in the comment section of Glenn Beck’s The Blaze. “It’s simple. Arrest B. Obama or arrest me.”
The difference - at least for the sake of argument - between Lakin and Moran is that Moran’s crusade against Obama comes after the President released the long-form version of his birth certificate in April. As TPM chronicled, the release of the records did little to stop fringe conspiracy theorists from saying he wasn’t qualified to be President, quickly latching onto a bogus forgery theory based on a misunderstanding of how Photoshop works.
Moran has also called Obama “a coward and a liar,” and said his “sharia, koran, muslim, islam loving gig is up.”
“Burying that creep bin Laden with religious honors is traitorous to Americans…Maybe you are on the wrong side, huh?” he wrote.
Moran also discussed his opposition to the repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy on his Twitter account and in a post on Red County, where he wrote that Obama “signed a law condoning the sin of the gay, lesbian, and bi-sexual lifestyles and forced that upon all the regular families in the military.”
Adam Weinstein writes in Mother Jones that Moran is the first active-duty member of the military serving overseas who has refused to serve because of his issues with Obama’s birth certificate. We’ve reached out to an Air Force spokesman and will update if we hear back.
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Ryan J. Reilly
Ryan J. Reilly is a D.C.-based reporter for TPM. Prior to joining TPM, he worked for a news website covering the Justice Department and was a researcher for Bloomberg News. His email address is ryan(at)talkingpointsmemo.com.
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