Karma is a bitch.
ORLY?
Perhaps the most toxic legacy of the 2008 Presidential campaign was the emergence of the Birthers.
As Barack Obama’s campaign took off, a die-hard band of desperate reality-deniers, led by their cuckoo queen Dentist/Lawyer Orly Taitz, combined increasingly ridiculous conspiracy theories about the circumstances and location of Obama’s birth with a peculiar hard-core interpretation of the intent behind the Constitutional phrase “natural born citizens” into a (to them) compelling case that Obama was ineligible to be POTUS.
At first, they posited, Barack Hussein Obama was not actually born in the state of Hawaii, but was instead born in Kenya, then whisked into the US and records falsified to make him an American. Because Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. intentionally left the US while she was enormous with child so that she could give birth to her son in a third-world country instead of an American hospital, but anticipated that their bi-racial son born in pre-Loving v. Virginia America would someday be a shoo-in for the Presidency or something.
As people continued to point and laugh at their complex crackpot theories, some Birthers began to advance a second argument, which they found even more compelling.
Even if they conceded that Obama was born on US soil, he didn’t meet the criterion of “natural born citizen” because his birth father was not himself a US citizen, but a Kenyan. By stretching the Constitution just so and holding it over a candle to reveal hidden inscriptions in invisible ink, they determined that a “natural born citizen” could not be born to a parent who held citizenship in any other country, because that made the child a dual national, not a real American.
Swine flu is sweeping Mexico and has made its way into the United States–Kansas, Texas, and California– prompting the World Health Organization to announce that the recent swine flu outbreak is a “p
