In an astonishing scoop, Somer reveals the truth regarding Barack Obama’s birth certificate. There are no pictures of her underwear this time. Instead, a story that’s amazingly on-topic.

The Surreal Obama Birth Conspiracy

By Somer Knight

“The Birthers are stupid, really stupid,” said Doctor Kermit Krankzinnig, D. Amphib. Let. The world-famous Dutch expert on conspiracies literally spat out the words with disdain. Alas, it was not the first time that I had to remove dark brown spittle from my turquoise blouse; this man was passionate about his opinions.

I was surprised by both his vehemence and conclusion: “But Doctor Krankzinnig, I am a bit surprised that you so quickly dismiss the possibility of this particular conspiracy, when you have done more than anyone alive to promote the idea that we live in a world of conspiracies. After all, I have you to thank for the world’s nearly unanimous response to my Top Shelf articles on the light bulb conspiracy and Da Vinci Code.” I bowed my head to honor the good Doctor.

He picked his teeth expertly and precisely — like the scientist I knew him to be. Ah, I was pleased to see that he’d found the source of our discomfort. It looked like chewing tobacco. He spat one last time, aiming for the wastebasket but hitting my left ankle. Fortunately I was wearing emerald green pantyhose that would not show the stain.

I asked him how much he actually knew about the birthers. It turned out to be enough. “If you look up the birthers on the current version of the Arpanet,” the learned Doctor explained, “you will find the one truly impeachable source on every subject known to Homo Sapiens humanity. It’s known as Wikipedia and it has supplanted the Encyclopedia Britannica, college textbooks, Walter Cronkite, and graduate students as the ultimate authority on pretty much everything. Here is its pithy, profound and pitiless pontification —“

A number of fringe activists and political opponents nicknamed "birthers" allege that [Obama] is not a natural born citizen, and thus is not eligible to be President of the United States under Article Two of the U.S. Constitution. The theory received attention in mid 2008 following Obama's victory in the Democratic primaries … and again in mid-2009 following Stefan F. Cook's lawsuit. The pejorative "birthers" moniker draws a parallel with 9/11 conspiracy theorists, who have been nicknamed "truthers".

“If the birthers are right about Obama’s being born in Kenya, which was not yet part of the United States,” Doctor Krankzinnig continued, “then they’d have discovered the direst, blackest, most alienating, most un-American conspiracy every conceived. But they’re wrong-headed. These guys wouldn’t recognize a true conspiracy even if it pounced on them like a black panther in a Somali jungle.”

“How so?” I was, to put it mildly, perplexed because I had until this momentous meeting believed that the birthers were onto something — just like those truthers who proved to us that steel cannot melt. “Is it not true,” I challenged, “that Obama has never released a copy of his original, official birth certificate, only, in June 2007, a short official certification of live birth? Why this fishy-squishy certificate and not the real thing as nightly demanded by Lou Dobbs on CNN? Couldn’t a mere certificate have been photoshopped — you know, forged?””

Doctor Krankzinnig smiled — almost wickedly: “Of course, all things are possible, but an expert in detecting forgeries, such as myself, can easily distinguish between what is real and what is fake. Consider these acknowledged hoaxes,” he said as he spread five computer printouts in front of him.

“First, look at this early fake. Brilliantly composed, it purports to be an 1865 photo of Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the Confederacy, who, according to Northern propaganda, had been dressed as a woman when captured. What a sissy! they said.”

"For a long time,” the Doctor continued, “this photograph influenced public opinion. The Femmes Society of New Orleans even made Davis their honorary president. However, I have at long last proven -- with the help of an electron microscope — that this picture is a fake, albeit one that was exceptionally well-executed. If you look very, very closely at direction of the shadows in the blow-up of the original photograph, they definitively prove that Jeff Davis’s
head was added to a woman’s body.”

Dirty politics, the Doctor contended, had produced most of the fakes. Some were easy to debunk, but there was one photo that was being circulated by enemies of the Clintons that he felt might contain several truths in addition to its one obvious falsehood. It purported to be a photo of Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, enjoying the company of two men on a tropical beach (possibly in Iran):

“It’s a transparent photoshop,” Doctor Krankzinnig explained. “How do I know? Because Hillary never once met Saddam Hussein, the gent with the moustache. If you use an electronic microscope, you will see that his head is too large for the body. So it’s an obvious fake designed to imply that Hillary was overly “friendly” with the former dictator of Iraq.”

“Even so,” the doctor continuted, “I would very much like to know who the second guy is — you know, the geezer with the long beard who’s actually got his hand cupped around Hillary’s left bazoom. If I can track him down, I believe I can prove that the fake Saddam, the third member of this sexual manage for three, was in fact President Clinton himself. Wouldn’t that be a juicy scandal!”

To his obvious disappointment (my chances for afternoon sex were fast receding), I had to admit that I couldn’t identify the geezer in the turban. The Doctor was intrigued, however, by my suggestion that Hillary’s beau might be, given the length of his beard, an Orthodox rabbi. “You might look for him in Jerusalem,” I ventured.

Indeed, Doctor Krankzinnig was so pleased with this suggestion that he showed me another photograph that he claimed to be an especially notable fake. Concocted by two girls in Cottingley, England in 1917, it was part of a series of photos of the girls cavorting with fairies in their own backyard garden:

“It’s an especially clumsy hoax, an insult to our intelligence,” he snarled. He then wondered out loud why it had taken almost a century before anyone — namely, Doctor Krankzinnig himself — to provide definitive proof of its fraudulence.

Yet I had to confess that the fairies looked real enough to me. A clumsy fake? I thought not — quite to the contrary, it would take modern technology I figured to expose this one as a hoax. So I asked the good Doctor if his debunking had required an electron microscope. Perhaps, I ventured, the girl’s head and body had been inserted into a genuine photo of fairies?

“How foolish can you be? he barked, “I told you this was an especially crude fake. Can’t you see that?”

When I still could not, with great exasperation he said, “Those couldn’t possibly be real fairies because they’re all females. Right?” When I agreed that the fairies did indeed appear to be female, Doctor Krankvinnig, drawing himself up to his maximum height of five foot four, pronounced, “So you agree — the photo is a fake because the supposed fairies are female and we know that all fairies are male! I ask — have you ever met a female fairy? You don’t actually believe that Michael Jackson was a woman?”

While I was not ready to debate the sexuality of Michael Jackson, I couldn’t help but point out that the fairies in the photographs might indeed be male because I knew several men who’d love to dress in a gossamer dress. Blushing, I added, “You never know if you’re talking to a woman or a man these days.”

“Well, I certainly know my sexes,” the Doctor replied. “You’re definitely all woman, for I’ve never met a man with your flair for color coordination. What man would ever match a turquoise blouse with a red belt, leopard skin skirt, green stockings, and navy blue shoes?”

You can well imagine how flattered I was by such praise, but his next statement almost persuaded me that the good Doctor was making a pass at me, for he now admitted that perhaps I was right -- that the fairies might indeed be cross-dressed males. So he’d have to take out his equipment to determine their true gender. Only then could be make a case that the photos were fraudulent.

The Doctor had actually admitted that I might be right about something. Was he smitten with me? Alas, my soaring hopes for me and the Doctor crashed back to earth when he sighed, “Perhaps we should stop looking at faked photos, for I cannot afford to devote more time to debunking hoaxes when there are so many authentic conspiracies to prove.”

Was he finally going to return to the subject of Obama and the birthers, the ostensible reason for our meeting? No, there was one last detour to be made, this time into the life of the woman who made Obama president. “Look at this old cover from TV Guide,” he said; “what do you see?”

“It claims to be a photo of Oprah Winfrey,” I said. “But is it a fake? Is it actually a photo of a drag queen?” It did occur to me that only a guy could look that good in a dress.

“Close,” he replied, “but not close enough. It’s a famous fake, but it’s definitely Oprah’s face. As for the body, it was Ann-Margret’s, who wasn’t even black. So there’s a lot you can do with computer graphics.”

I nodded in agreement — but also in slight amazement. I would never have believed that any woman could have legs as beautiful as Ru Paul’s. My head spinning in confusion, I had no rejoinder when Doctor Krankzinnig insisted that TV Guide could just as easily have put Barack Obama’s head on Ann-Margret’s body in order to convince us that the President was — or had been — a cross-dresser.

The thought of that gave me a tingle, even as I appreciated that it might be politically damaging for Obama to end up in the same clothes closet as J. Edgar Hoover. After all, the stout little FBI director must have looked dreadful in a dress. But what did this have to do with the birthers’ claim that Obama hadn’t been born in the USA and so lacked the constitutional right to be President? Was photoshopping somehow involved?

The good Doctor grabbed my knees to emphasize his final argument and most important discovery. “The birthers have been right about one thing,” he said. “They were right to point out that Obama has been suspiciously reluctant to release his Hawaiian birth certificate. They got that right, but they have totally, almost comically misinterpreted that reluctance. There is no possible doubt that Obama was born in the USA; after all, by 1961 when he was born, Boeing 707 jets had been flying around the globe for three years. There was no way in the Jet Age that an American mom wasn’t going to have her baby in the USA, the country with the world’s best and cheapest medical care. Right?”

I nodded. After all, I watched Fox News regularly.

“So, if Obama was indeed born in Hawaii, why hasn’t he done the Full Monty with his birth certificate? What is he hiding?”

“Maybe the name of his real father?” I offered. “Maybe it wasn’t the Kenyan black guy. Maybe his real father — you know, the guy who donated the semen — was a white man. Wouldn’t that make Obama a fraud when he claims to be African-American?”

Doctor Krankzinnig game me a withering look. “Somer, have you actually seen Barack Obama on television? Does he look like someone with two white parents?”

The Doctor believed that he had crushed me with this challenge, but I knew better. Perhaps Barack Obama was a white guy who tanned easily — like Denzell Washington. But I knew by now that if I contradicted the good Doctor that he might take such a discursive detour in response that we might never get back to the key question: What might Obama be trying to hide by refusing to release a copy of his complete birth certificate?

So I equivocated: “You must be right. Obama has to be at least half-black. His hands and his Adam’s apple give him away. So, if it’s not to hide his place of birth or the identity of his father, why has Barack been so reluctant to post his birth certificate on the web?”

Why indeed?

“How many times must this question be asked? The answer, my friend, is staring at you from the Oprah cover of the TV Guide. What if the face were false, too? What if someone else — say Barack himself — had been made up to look like Oprah? Could you tell the difference? Can you tell what is false and what is real when it comes to gender?”

It seemed a strange question for the Doctor to ask, given what he had said earlier about knowing his sexes. But then, when you get right down to it, gender and sex aren’t quite the same thing, are they? So maybe Doctor Krankzinnig was hairsplitting or dancing, as great intellects are prone to do, like an angel on the head of a pin.

“What if I were to tell you that Obama is holding back his birth certificate — the official document — because he is trying to hide the fact that he was … … born a girl? How about that? Isn’t that a stunner?”

A stunner indeed. A past sex change had never occurred to me — sure, maybe for Rosie O’Donnell, Roseanne Barr, Christine Jorgensen or Sarah Palin, but certainly not for Barack Obama. He is, after all, a distinctly “manly” man who bowls to a fault, tosses a baseball like a pro softballer, and drinks a beer, Bud Light, that’s the homebrew of lumberjacks. You just know he likes plenty of red meat in his quiche.

But it was difficult to argue against the photographic evidence that Doctor Krankzinnig now piled up in front of me, for no matter how closely I inspected it, it had definitely not been photoshopped. This was the unalterated truth. “Let’s start,” the Doctor said, “with the earliest known photo of the future President; and you be the judge.”

“If this was a boy, would he be wearing a white bow in his hair?” the Doctor asked.

For me, the bow was problematic, but not inexplicable inasmuch as the bow might have been intended as a subliminal reminder to the hospital staff that the baby was half-white. Maybe they hoped he’d get treated better that way. So I wasn’t convinced that the photo proved much of anything, and said so to the esteemed Doctor, who then pushed a second photo in my direction. It showed, he said, a slightly older Barack with an unknown adult —

It had to be Barack — look at the telltale ears. Reluctantly I had to admit that Barack (the one on the right) sure looked like a little girl. And once again, what’s with the white clothes? However, I didn’t think the picture dispositive (a big word I learned from television cop shows) since Barack might have been dressed that way for Halloween.

Then came a third photo:

The ears once again gave away the game — it was Barack and here he was at age 6 definitely looking like a little girl. There were more photos to come, a flood of photos, but they did not contradict the Doctor’s thesis: that Barack Obama was born a girl and raised as one for several years. It was no wonder that his birth certificate was so hush-hush. It must have an “F” where there should be an “M”.

“Okay, I’m with you so far,” I told Doctor Krankvinnig, “but there’s no way that Barack is still a woman. When did he change his sex?”

Once again, the Doctor produced photographic evidence — always the best kind of evidence, right? Once again the ears told all. It was definitely a photo of Barack as a tween with his father:

Again those ears. The evidence, of which I’ve had space here to produce but a small part, to me seemed incontrovertible. But I wanted it spelled out: to “So you’re saying that Barack Obama, began his transition from F-E-M-A-L-E to M-A-L-E at some point between the age of six and ten?”

“Precisely. While I cannot say, based on the evidence, whether there was any surgery (breast removal being unnecessary if he started hormone therapy at a young age), I stake my professional prestige and credentials on Barack Obama’s having been born a woman. That is the truth that the conspiracy is designed to suppress.

“But why change Barack’s sex from female to male?” I asked.

“Simple, his grandmother, the banker who actually raised him, was very ambitious for her remarkably gifted child. She truly believed Barack could become the first black president. But not as a female. True, Geraldine Ferraro and Sarah Palin hadn’t yet made their run for vice-president or Hillary for president. However, Barack’s grandmother understood even then that the USA was far more likely to choose a man for president — any man, even a non-white — over any woman, no matter how accomplished. I figure she was the one who oversaw Barack’s transition to manhood — and from thence to the Presidency.”

Wow, could it be so? Yet there remained two seemingly insurmountable barriers for the Doctor’s hypothesis to hurdle. Their names were Malia and Sasha. “What about the two girls,” I objected. “If Barack is transgendered, how did he sire two kids? How would he have the balls to do it? Two natural-born women can’t make a baby, can they? And I never heard any rumors about adoptions.”

“Ah,” the Doctor said. “That is the final piece of the puzzle, and for me the most convincing one — at least for any male who has ever tried to pass as a woman.”

I wondered just whom he meant. Was he on to me?

“Men and women are just built differently,” he explained with some condescension, as if parent to child. “Women have, for example, circular faces and men, rectangular ones. It takes a lot of expensive surgery to try to get around that barrier to successful cross-dressing. Also, women are shorter, with narrower shoulders than men. That’s why most stories about males who successfully pass as females start off by telling us that the guy was unusually petite for his sex.”

I nodded. Yet it bothered me that he was making such a big deal about such obvious facts. It had taken much willpower to stifle a couple of “duhs” as he was making such elementary points about the difference between the male and female anatomies. Any cretin knows, I grumbled to myself, that males have long, rectangular faces, large shoulders, and tall frames. Mired in thought, I was not ready for the Doctor’s next and final point. The devastating truth stuck me at last.

“Observe the official portrait of Michelle Obama, the president’s wife. I found it on Wikipedia. Look at that long, angular face and at those broad, robust shoulders. And keep in mind that she is almost as tall as her 6 foot 2 inch husband.”

The Doctor played his final trump: “Now you see how they were able to have children together, despite the fact that Barack Obama was born a woman. It’s self-evident that Michelle is actually a Michel or a Mike.”

What an extraordinary hypothesis! If true, then the Obama birth certificate might reveal one of the most spectacular conspiracies ever hatched by man or grandmother. The birthers, I decided, were amateurs when it came to playing the conspiracy game; whereas, Doctor Kermit Kranzvinnig, D. Amph. Let. was clearly a true professional.