Obama Conspiracy Theories

Alter.net has published its Top 10 Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories list, and the birthers didn’t make the cut. Is this part of the conspiracy, to keep Obama conspiracies down? Here I thought I was doing a heroic job battling one of the biggest lunacies of the age, only to find out that it’s not even on the list.

According to the article, the importance of Obama’s election was not in creating new conspiracy theories, but in increasing paranoia among those enmeshed in existing theories. For them, Obama is only the incarnation of the New World Order, not its essence.

Today, hundreds of Patriot groups around the country are actively preparing for the declaration of martial law, some of them by mapping wilderness areas, learning how to set booby traps, studying and practicing guerrilla warfare tactics, and setting up short-wave radio communications systems. The question is not if, but when, the New World Order will come crashing down.

I guess the story that a baby was born in Kenya pales in comparison to the military bio-weapons program attacking the US with the avian flu or a national declaration of martial law.

One obligatory note: some of the conspiracies listed are not exclusively those of right-wing conservatives.

Some conspiracy  theorists have observed that the recently-seen diplomatic passport for Barack Obama shows his name as “Barack Hussein Obama” but his Certification of Live Birth shows the name as “Barack Hussein Obama II.” In conspiracy theories, any inconsistency is proof of the conspiracy, whatever it is.

How is it possible that the names do not match? Is it proof that one of the documents is fake? Unlikely, according to this from the US Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Manual governing names on passports:

Families sometimes change name suffixes when an older generation dies. You may accommodate such a request provided the suffix on the identification documents presented corresponds to the name requested.

7 FAM 1300 Appendix C

A birth certificate is not an identification document.

H/t to Scientist.

Recent disclosures by Allen and Strunk’s Freedom of Information Act releases have fueled an old conspiracy theory about Barack Obama and his mother. Rather than being a commie radical, she was actually a spy for the CIA! That’s what an article titled Obama’s Pedigree at the Opinion Maker web site this past Friday. It’s been copied and reprinted on other web sites.

Wayne Madsen, writing for Opinion Maker, sees the destruction of routine passport applications in the 1980′s as part of a CIA coverup of the undercover activities of Obama’s mother — that eventually resulted in the recruitment of Barack Obama by the CIA after his graduation from Columbia University in 1983.

Social Security Card

The Social Security Administration publishes a data file called the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) containing the Social Security Numbers of all deceased Social Security registrants. A number of web sites provide copies of the SSDI that you can search for free, such as the one at Ancestry.com.

Now I am not going to assert what the President’s Social Security Number is, but the number that is being batted around as belonging to the “person born 119 years ago” is reported on some web sites as xxx-xx-4425 and others as 042-68-xxxx. If you type any of the suggested  numbers into the SSDI search page, you find no records–meaning that either this is not an issued Social Security Number or that the registrant is still living. I looked up the record of my late father who died in November 2009 and it was there.

While on the Social Security Number topic, WorldNetDaily seems to be trying to revive this old myth in an article on the subject from May 11: Investigators: Obama uses Connecticut Soc. Sec. Number. When WND wants to lie, they quote someone else that lies for them. In this case it is Orly Taitz’s investigator Susan Daniels who does the dirty deed:

Daniels said. “It’s against the law for a person to have a re-issued or second Social Security number issued.”

There is nothing unlawful about having a second Social Security number issued. The Social Security web site even tells you what form you need to fill out. (more…)