Obama's Birth Certificate

It started 47 years ago, when Barack Mohammad Obama was born in the Aga Khan University Hospital of Nairobi.

As his Kenyan family assembled around Ann Dunham Obama's bed, to watch the beautiful infant curl his tiny fingers around his mother's thumb, a conspiracy was already under way - one which would set in motion a path of events taking nearly half a century to complete.

"This baby," said Barack Obama Sr, watching his son squirm, "will one day become President of the United States."

"But Barack," one of Obama's Luo friends warned him, "such a thing is impossible. For a man to become President of America, he must be what they call a 'natural born citizen.'"

"Well then," Obama sneered, "that is what we must make baby Barack..."

And so they did.

Teaming up with the Kenyan government, the staff of Aga Khan hospital and every employee and executive of Continental Airlines, Barack Obama Snr successfully covered up his wife's trip to Africa, instead fabricating a fool-proof fiction that suggested that she'd never left Hawaii and little Barack had been born there, instead. They smuggled baby Barack into America, successfully silencing the crew, stewards, pilots and passengers of the commandeered aircraft into maintaining this secret.

Next, teaming up with the staff at Kapi'olani Medical Center for Women & Children, in Honolulu Hawaii, Obama Snr successfully managed to forge documentation recording baby Barack's birth there. Through his connections with the Hawaii state government, he successfully obtained a fake birth certificate recording Obama's birthplace at the USA, rather than Nairobi. Realising that his Muslim heritage might be a disadvantage in fifty years time, Obama changed Barack's middle name from 'Mohammad' to 'Hussein' at the same time.

But the conspiracy was not done there...

Barack Obama's friends at the Honolulu Advertiser placed two birth announcements in the local papers, in order to fool the general public into believing that the child of Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Senior was actually born in America, rather than Africa.

And only after accomplishing this masterstroke of deception, which entailed the collaboration of hundreds of state and government officials in two different countries, could Barack Obama Snr cross his arms and smile in satisfaction.

"Now," he beamed, looking forward 47 years into the future, "now all is prepared for my son to become President."

If you're unaware, the above is a brief fiction I've written - based on what's commonly accepted amongst a subset of American conservatives calling themselves 'birthers.'

These idiots - and idiots is the only accurate description of 'birthers' - are still bleating the conspiracy that Barack Obama is not an American citizen, and was actually born in Kenya. This, according to them, makes him ineligible to occupy the White House.

"We're getting ready for the Communist takeover of America with a non-citizen at the helm."

Michael Savage

'Birthers' rank even higher than 'truthers' in their idiocy.

['Truthers,' for the uninitiated, are the conspiracy theorists who believe that Bush, Cheney and a Israeli illuminati conspired to bring down the twin towers on 9/11 - Editorial Bear]

You'd think that 'birthers' would have crawled back into the woodwork, over six months after Obama took office. However, they're still at work - gloriously undermining the Republican's attempt to reform into an electable party. Just last week, 'birthers' heckled moderate Republican Michael Castle, when he announced to the audience at a town hall event in Delaware that 'the president there, he is a citizen of the United States.'

My problem with the 'birthers' is that their doubts of Obama's citizenship are just deeply, deeply stupid. Even worse than that, they're persistant.

Even today, Hawaii State Officials were forced to reiterate that Obama's birth certificate is genuine and that he was born in the United States of America on August 4th, 1961.

Obama's birth certificate, in the hands of FackCheck writer Joe Miller

The fact that they had to do this - again - shows what a farce the situation is and how stubbornly, unbelieveably stupid 'birthers' are. Just like all the idiots in the far right of American politics, they still believe in the fallacy that if you want something to be true badly enough (Obama's fake certificate, creationism, the 'conspiracy' of Global Warming) than you can 'believe' it into becoming the truth.

A birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, August 8th 1961

Unfortunately for them, that's not true. 'Truth' isn't decided by committee, or popular opinion - only by cold, sterile, objective examination of the facts. And in this instance, the facts are unequivocal. Barack Obama was born in the United States of America and is a United States citizen - making him eminently qualified to hold the office of President.

Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama

In the lead-up to the election, the conservative opponents of Barack Obama threw countless questions at him - questions regarding his birth, his upbringing, his religion and his relationships.

They demanded answers to these questions, seemingly unaware that these answers were already sitting on a shelf in their local Barnes and Noble - in the form of Barack Obama's first book, Dreams from my Father.

Written in 1995, when Obama had just been elected president of the Harvard Law Review (and his political career wasn't even conceived of) Dreams from my Father is a spectacularly candid biography that earnestly and honestly examines many of the perceived 'issues' people had with the idea of electing Obama.

The book is an education - an education all those political pundits should have availed themselves of.

Dreams from my Father is practically unique in the history of American politics. Sure, plenty of presidential candidates had written books. No less than 16 of the candidates in the 2008 Republican and Democratic primaries had political manifestos on the bookshelves of Borders and Amazon.

However, Dreams from my Father was written before Obama considered running for senator or president. That makes it uniquely free of snake-oil and slickness.

The Obama we read about in Dreams from my Father is a sharply introspective man, desperate to make sense of the confusing place he finds himself growing up in cross-cultural America.

Born of a black African and a white American, Obama describes being balanced on the knife-edge between black and white American culture.

As Obama grows up, as described in the first part of Dreams from my Father, he gravitates towards the African American community, but feels unable to integrate with them fully because he lacked the experience of growing up as a black American (he was raised by his white mother in Hawaii and Indonesia.)

He's also apprehensive of the more militant blacks he meets, who condemn white culture as the reason for their plight. This is jarring for him, as Obama's white grandparents set a great example of how tolerant and liberal white, mid-Western Americans can be.

The second part of the book explores his move to Chicago. In attempting to make a positive difference to the lives of impoverished blacks, Obama finds it difficult to swallow the liberal assumption that black poverty is reinforced by institutionalized racism.

The reality of the situation - that poverty in the inner city is at least partially perpetuated by the very people it affects - is a realization that Obama certainly didn't feel comfortable discussing with the community he was helping to 'organize.'

As the second section of the book ends, with Obama winning a place at Harvard and giving up his position as community organizer, it's clear he's become frustrated by the fact that the answers he seeks aren't black and white. Much like himself, they're a mixture of the two.

The final section of Dream from my Father is more personal, as Obama travels to his father's birthplace, Kenya, to meet his African family.

Travelling to the 'old country,' he admits that he hoped to find the answers he was seeking by embracing his African heritage. However, like everything else he describes in his book, it's not quite as simple as that.

Despite being welcomed and embraced by his enormous family, Obama's still left as the outsider. While he doesn't feel the alienation of being black in Africa, he's still on the outside, looking in, because in Kenya he's an 'American' rather than a native.

If the message of Dreams from my Father is anything, it's that there are no clear, easy and straightforward answers to anything.

During the years he described in his biography, Obama tried to embrace many different lives in order to find his 'place' in America. Ultimately, all of them came up short. Obama's American experience was not one of being 'black' or 'white' or even 'brown'. He was all of those things, yet simultaneously not 'enough' of any of them.

Even fourteen years ago, when he hadn't had the experience earned in the State or Federal Senate, it was apparent that Barack Obama was a wise, rational man who rejected polarizing ideology or blithe answers that inadequately answered life's more difficult questions.

It's that mentality, so beautifully outlined in Dreams from my Father, that make me even more confident that America's made the right choice in electing him president.

On behalf of New Jersey...

...I'd like to apologise for this moron:

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court has turned down an emergency appeal from a New Jersey man who says President-elect Barack Obama is ineligible to be president because he was a British subject at birth. Read the full story here.

Apparently this 'defender of the Constitution' is from nearby East Brunswick and also launched appeals against John McCain and Roger Calero being made president. McCain I can understand - he was born in Panama, albeit in US Army base.

Appealing against Roger Calero's right to occupy the White House - which was about as likely as me becoming president - just seems like a waste of time. But as Leo Donofrio of East Brunswick, N.J. proved, when you're a complete idiot, you have all the time in the world to waste in frivolous court cases.

As for the 'issue' over Obama's birth certificate... Can disgruntled Conservatives quit flogging that deceased nag now? Honestly... I thought the Democrats whining over the 2000 Florida election results was bad enough. Trying to dislodge Obama from the White House via a very tenuous conspiracy theory about his 'secret birth' in Kenya is, frankly, just pathetic.

In fact, his parents even announced Barack's arrival in the Honolulu Advertiser.