Your birther insanity for the day

I recently came across this ingeniously crackpot post on Alex Jones’s popular conspiracy site, Infowars: A major Ghanaian news outlet has been caught in a revealing slip-up after it reported that President Barack Obama’s recent visit to the African country was a return to his birthplace. […] Contained in an otherwise relatively mundane account of ...

By , a former associate editor at Foreign Policy.

I recently came across this ingeniously crackpot post on Alex Jones's popular conspiracy site, Infowars:

I recently came across this ingeniously crackpot post on Alex Jones’s popular conspiracy site, Infowars:

A major Ghanaian news outlet has been caught in a revealing slip-up after it reported that President Barack Obama’s recent visit to the African country was a return to his birthplace. […]

Contained in an otherwise relatively mundane account of Obama’s recent visit to Ghana in the Daily Graphic news outlet is a sentence sure to raise eyebrows amongst people like journalist Jerome Corsi, who has been at the forefront of the Obama birth certificate scandal since well before the election.

The full paragraph reads, “For Ghana, Obama’s visit will be a celebration of another milestone in African history as it hosts the first-ever African-American President on this presidential visit to the continent of his birth.”

Why the Ghanaian news outlet would report that Obama was born on the continent of Africa, when this would instantly invalidate his entire presidency, is unclear.

I really love the idea that The Daily Graphic somehow got the scoop of the century and decided it belonged in paragraph four of their "otherwise mundane account." This would probably qualify as the most egregious instance of "burying the lede" in the history of newspaper journalism.

The paper seems to have corrected the error, but not before the claim made the rounds on message boards acress the interwebs, including the comment thread of this unrelated FP article.

In any event, I’m curious how people in Kenya (or is it Indonesia? I can’t keep up.) are reacting to the birther phenomenon. Are they completely dismissive of the idea, or somewhat intrigued by the possibility of being Obama’s birthplace? Any Passport readers abroad hearing anything interesting?

Joshua Keating was an associate editor at Foreign Policy. Twitter: @joshuakeating

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