There are endless charges right-thinking Americans can make against Obama, including his unparalleled combination of arrogance and incompetence.

But one thing that makes us look stupid and paranoid is this continuing obsession with Obama’s alleged non-American citizenship.

Depending on which of the trumped-up emails you receive, he was born in Kenya or Indonesia or Mars.

Note that all this stuff appears only in endlessly-circulated emails. No legitimate right-wing media outlet talks about this.

But for the fanatics, any signature and seal on any presented birth certificate is contested, carbon-14 dating is demanded, subterfuge and bribery is alleged, ad nauseum.

These are the grassy-knoll conspiracists of the right wing.

There is no “cover-up.”

Nobody wants Obama out of office more than me, but only a fool will waste one moment of attention on this distraction instead of the main objections to the re-election of The Anointed One and his congressional cronies.

Yes, there’s no question the lamestream media is ignoring or downplaying all sorts of Obama flaws.

But journalists' greed for fame would trump this.

Ask yourself this: If there was the slightest scintilla of evidence supporting this conspiracy theory, wouldn’t the win-at-any-price Hillary campaign have jumped all over it?

That is what campaigns do through their “oppo research.” The Clintons’ ruthless staff already did that.

Yes, the mainstream media is overwhelmingly liberal, but Fox, the Wall Street Journal, Investors Business Daily, and a host of other reliable anti-Obama conservative voices will jump on any remotely-credible lead in a heartbeat.

If you want to get technical:

Part of this baloney-fest is based on two things:

a) Ignorance of the law, specifically the legal concepts of jus sanguinis (right of blood) and jus soli (right of birthplace)

and

b) A willful attempt to conflate evidence about his birth certificate being faked, the ludicrousness of which, once examined, recalls Oliver Stone’s paranoid “JFK.”

These claims have been exhaustively debunked by UrbanLegends, Snopes.com, the Chicago Tribune, FactCheck, the US Immigration Service, Grolier Online, and Wikipedia, to name just a few authorities.

For proof, just read the following and their linked articles:

http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/barackobama/a/obama_citizen.htm

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/07/28/hawaii-declares-obama-birth-certificate-real/

Anyone who receives one of these silly emails should send this link to whoever sent it to you. Not that it’ll do much good.