Calling Nostradamus

I was shocked to hear that CNN released a poll that found that 16 percent of all Americans think Obama was probably born in another country and 11 percent definitely think he was. According to the poll, more than a quarter of Americans think there is a very strong possibility that Obama is constitutionally ineligible to serve as president.

The problem with the whole "birther" movement is that it is being sold to a post-Watergate audience, an era when people have lost their rose colored glasses and see conspiracies behind every underground garage column. As gullible as we once were in believing that our representatives were good, honest people, we now believe that it's possible that there is a plot behind everything, even the election of a president.

But if you think about it, the whole thing is just so fantastic.

A baby is born in Kenya in 1961 and a plot is hatched to put him in the White House some day. This involves incredible faith in both the baby and the United States.

In 1961 Black people were still being discriminated against in the south. James Meredith had not entered U. Mississippi, an event that required President Kennedy to send 5,000 federal troops to enforce. It was only a couple of years since Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus.

Volunteers were sent to the south in 1961 to help black citizens vote and encountered tremendous resistance. Some of the volunteers were killed merely for trying to help Black people get to the ballot box. The poll tax would not be eliminated for three more years.

The March on Washington was still two years away.

In this atmosphere, some incredibly prescient person in Kenya had to determine that one day the United States would accept a Black president and that this newborn baby was the child who was going to be the president. They would have to plant a phony birth announcement in a Hawaii newspaper so that when the Hawaiian birth certificate were to be questioned decades later, they could point to the newspaper archives to prove that the birth had actually taken place in Hawaii.

It also assumes that the child would be intelligent and would grow up to be a charismatic leader. I always assumed my kids were super intelligent and charismatic. Don't all parents? But they could just as easily have turned out to be stupid dullards. Who knew at birth?

Was there something about this child? Did a big star shine over the home where he was born on the day of his birth and did visitors come from afar to examine him? or is there somewhere a village in Kenya where all the children born in a certain era were going to be groomed for the eventual U.S. presidency on the off chance that Blacks were ever to achieve full equality in the violently racially divided country.

I don't think even Nostradamus would have predicted that.

And did these people who just knew that eventually this child was going to be presidential material fly him immediately to Hawaii so he could grow up in the country he would one day lead, assuming a Civil Rights Bill was eventually passed and accepted by the citizens of the country, or have they also falsified all of the Hawaiian school records as well?

It doesn't take a heap of logic to figure out that the claims of his Kenyan citizenship are not only false, but embarrassingly stupid.

And yet, according to the most recent polls, a decent percentage of Americans still have doubts about Obama's citizenship...and apparently the number of birthers may be growing.

I don't know who the PR people are who are feuling the fires of this ridiculous proposition, but I'm sure that there is a branch office somewhere selling refrigerators to Eskimos and bridges to New York tourists.