Facts can't dispel Obama conspiracy sideshow

Barack Obama might have thought a majority in the Electoral College would be enough to ensure him the presidency, to provide an indisputable exclamation mark after the 67 million votes he won in November.

That’s only because Obama won’t admit the truth: The Hawaii-born former senator from Illinois isn’t really a “natural-born” citizen of the United States of America and is, therefore, ineligible to be president.

It’s true!

There are lawsuits, and blogs, and Web sites filled with things that look like facts! Heck, there was even a full-page ad in the Chicago Tribune, before its parent company declared bankruptcy!

If the mainstream media weren’t in cahoots with the courts, and if everybody would bother to read the U.S. Constitution, we’d all know that the presidential election of 2008 isn’t finished, heaven help us.

Despite the fact that he was born in Honolulu to an American mother and has the birth certificate to prove it, Obama isn’t really an American, according to lawsuits filed by people who really need to consider finding a hobby.

The certifiable certificate hunters occupy just one branch of the crazy tree of deniers who have crafted a tangle of competing claims, none of which makes anything like sense:

1. Obama’s birth certificate is a fake, forged by the state of Hawaii, which would be plain if the campaign would just release it, along with his letters of admission to Occidental College, Columbia and Harvard.

2. The decision to release the birth certificate to the well-respected FactCheck.org Web site (which confirmed its authenticity) proves that Obama has something to hide, since facts are untrustworthy.

3. The publication of a birth announcement in the local paper 47 years ago proves nothing, since that was a ruse to protect the infant Obama’s ability to run for president, since he was actually born in Kenya.

4. Even if Obama was born in Hawaii to an American mother and can prove it, his father was a Kenyan, and, therefore, Obama isn’t a natural-born citizen, despite the fact that he was born in America to an American mother.

5. Actually, his father was British. But same thing.

6. Since Obama later lived in Indonesia with his mother, he actually became an Indonesian citizen, because anyone who lives anywhere other than the United States automatically becomes a citizen of that country. It’s in a book someplace.

7. Because Obama hasn’t been willing to directly answer questions dropping from the crazy tree — and because the courts have refused to make him — then Obama is a traitor, and nobody has to listen to him when he’s president.

That last one seems to be the goal, of course, of the whole bizarre campaign, which would be meaningless to most of us except for the fact that the U.S. Supreme Court wasted a few minutes recently batting aside a lawsuit on the subject.

These conspiracy kooks (more than a few of whom also believe that George W. Bush ordered the 9/11 attacks) have erected an impenetrable wall of lunacy around Obama’s citizenship, and no birth certificate or testimony, no court decision or proof can penetrate it.

If you don’t agree with such certainties, it’s only because you’re too gullible.

If that kind of reasoning sounds familiar, it should; the naivete of the populace has been the bane of every conspiracy theorist since the Masons built the pyramids with help from aliens.