I don't know why I do it sometimes, because it makes me weep for our nation...

Every now and then I thumb through the astounding number of right-wing sites out there on the internet. I suppose I could say it was to try to understand what the wingnuts are thinking, which is OK so long as you stay on moderately thoughtful conservative sites, but such reasoning loses all credibility once you hit crazy conspiracy sites like newsmax.com -- a site that pretends to be a legitimate news source. At that point, you realize that making an honest effort to approach the truth is beyond these frothing fools' grasp.

I honestly don't know how you begin to approach people who are so utterly invested in their myopic worldviews that they cling to falsehoods and unverifiable rumors -- not conjecture, but rumors with no basis in any sort of evidence. I can only imagine it's like talking to people who believe the moon landings were faked or to holocaust deniers.

Newsmax has as a "headline" -- again presenting their site as if it were actual news, much like the Onion does -- the following: "'Smears' About Obama Largely True" -- and the "story" goes on to outline ten items that most people think are smears but that Newsmax has unearthed as "largely true." It's worth quoting at length one of their claims:

Claim No. 8: Barack Obama is a Muslim.

FightTheSmears.com states bluntly that Obama is a Christian, not a follower of Islam.
In fact, Barack Hussein Obama’s Kenyan father was raised Muslim, though he reportedly was not religious.

His mother divorced and remarried another man, a Muslim from Indonesia. As a youngster in Indonesia, Barack Obama attended two schools and was registered at
both as a Muslim. He received religious instruction in both schools as a Muslim,
including studying the Quran. According to a childhood friend, Obama occasionally attended services at a local mosque.

[snip paragraph about the disgraceful Daniel Pipes]

Obama says he became a Christian in his late 20s. He now describes himself as Christian. Until recently, he spent two decades as a member of a Chicago United Church of Christ congregation that embraces Black Liberation theology. Somewhat like the Roman Catholic liberation theology of Latin America, the Chicago UCC church preaches elements of neo-Marxist class warfare. It combines these radical socialist
elements with black racialism.

We'll leave aside the ridiculous last paragraph about liberation theology, because it's really a bait and switch that allows Newsmax to blunt their admission that indeed, Obama is Christian -- because he's a Marxist Christian! OMG!

So the smear is that he's a Muslim, and the response -- the way in which Newsmax claims that it's "largely true" -- is that his father was a Muslim, that his step-father was a Muslim, and that as a young child he attended a religious-based school. The fact that for at least two decades -- until recently -- he had attended the same Christian church and claims repeatedly to be Christian apparently don't count.

Similarly, this website also makes claims -- despite the lack of evidence -- that Obama wasn't born in the United States. The only birth certificate available for Obama lists Hawaii as his birthplace, but Newsmax insinuates that it's a forgery...with absolutely no evidence.

It's absolutely laughable. It's as if I had put forward my previous post as fact, because of course no one could prove that McCain had not been programmed by a Bill Ayers-led North Vietnamese intelligence team, just as they couldn't prove that McCain and Obama aren't both aliens sent from Uranus intent on turning the earth over to the Intergalactic Harvesters. Because when you've descended to the level of wingnuttery, no conspiracy is too absurd.

Of course, in the 2000 Republican primary, Newsmax was attacking McCain repeatedly, including running stories supporting the notorious push-polls that intimated McCain had fathered an illegitimate Black child.