Keller @ Large: Enough Of The Illegitimate President Nonsense

BOSTON (CBS) - Move over baseball, or football, or Keeping up with the Kardashians, or whatever you think is truly the national pastime these days - there's a new contender moving up fast on the rail.

That would be the sport of delegitimization, the act of undermining the credibility of someone or something on the grounds that they use false pretenses to claim their stature.

President-elect Donald Trump poured the foundation for his election by questioning the legitimacy of Barack Obama's presidency by falsely claiming he wasn't born in the U.S., a lie eagerly swallowed by some of the same conservatives incensed over the left's bogus insistence that George W. Bush wasn't a "legitimate" president after the contested 2000 election.

And now, Democratic Georgia Congressman John Lewis has delivered a dose of his own medicine to Trump, claiming that he is an illegitimate president because of Russian efforts to try to influence the election outcome, even though the intelligence report on the Russian hacking offered no evidence of an actual impact on the vote.

What's wrong with all this?

Everything.

The illegitimacy card is an effective weapon, with at least one poll showing more than 40-percent of Republicans still believe the Obama birther garbage.

But it's also an overused tactic that's damaging to democracy. Trust in government and respect for the presidency has been in decline for years, and the scorched-earth legitimacy attacks accelerate that process.

If and when Trump or anyone else is proven to have cheated their way into office, we'll talk. Until then, the illegitimacy card is nothing more than a wicked cheap shot.