Well, it turns out that politicians have realized that in the Internet age, a good conspiracy theory can work wonders. So why not just start one? You know, like...

Do you ever wonder why some conspiracy theories, no matter how dumb they sound, seem to never die? Where do these things come from, anyway?

5 Barack Obama's Citizenship

The Theory:

Barack Obama isn't a natural born citizen of the United States and so legally cannot be president. He wasn't actually born in Hawaii and the Government is concealing this fact by refusing to release his Birth Certificate (or releasing a forgery).

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Who's to Blame:

World Net Daily.

This one started spreading through chain e-mails during the recent Democratic primaries, when office workers the world over were reading about how Barack Obama couldn't be president (in-between learning how to increase the size of their penis for pennies a day). For some strange reason nobody seemed very concerned about his citizenship when he was a mere Senator, but that was probably just an oversight on the part of the rigorous journalists and fact-checkers who create chain e-mails.



What are you pointing to? Space? Are you secretly from space, Barack Obama?!?

However, it wasn't until the idea escaped the confines of the Internet and forced its way into the mainstream media that it truly emerged as a full blown conspiracy theory. This was in large part thanks to WorldNetDaily, an ultraconservative news site that was the first major media outlet to report the idea. After that, WND columnists brought the theory to radio talk shows, and then it spread to FOX News and other TV outlets, snowballing from a series of e-mails into a national talking point.

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So, Why do People "Believe" It?

Despite the overwhelming physical evidence (the Obama campaign did in fact produce a copy of his birth certificate, and others even dug up the local Hawaiian newspaper from 1961 that has the Obama family birth announcement), it was promoted quite heavily by some Conservative commentators right up to Election Day and lives on in places like the Free Republic forums to this very day.

After all, you already had a guy with a foreign-sounding name, so what better way to influence a Presidential election than by suggesting the candidate is about as American as borscht?

Now that Obama has been elected and the Supreme Court has shot down legal challenges regarding his citizenship multiple times, the vast majority of political commentators quickly let this one die. A few committed critics of Obama still cling to it, though.

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After all, conspiracy theories never really die, they just wait for people to forget the evidence against it and bring it up later (hell, they've kept the JFK assassination conspiracy theory alive for 46 years). Right up until the day Obama leaves office, there will be a pocket of those who hold out hope that one day a birth certificate will emerge that shows Obama was born in the mountains of Pakistan from the womb of Satan, and then he'll be forced to flee the White House, revealed to the world as the gay communist Islamofascist terrorist they've always known him to be.