"Tinfoil" Conspiracy.

Tinny conspiracy

You've heard of the Red Hat Society? Meet the Tin Foil Hat Club.

While the former group is a respectable social network, the latter is a conglomeration of conspiracy theorists that have seized upon the President's birth status as their latest reason for being — and for being angry. Their efforts would be laughable if they weren't getting so much air and Internet time. So, some debunking:

As anyone with a reasoning function knows, President Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii, to an American mother and a Kenyan father. Hawaii was admitted as a state into the union two years before Barack Obama was born.

OK. Born in a state. American mother. Birth certificate to boot. Meets the citizenship qualifications to be president. Slam-dunk, right?

That's not enough, apparently, for the Tin Foil Hatters. They're led by members of Congress who are peddling a bill that requires presidential candidates to produce proof of citizenship, and they've found willing and windy adherents out in La-La Land.

Here's what you need to know about two of those sponsoring solons:

Rep. Bill Posey, R-Fla., introduced the bill. His past as a Sunshine State legislator includes publicly airing the idea of using “electric bleachers” instead of the electric chair to address a Death Row population he thought needed more expedient and wholesale thinning.

One of his co-sponsors is Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., the same guy who shot melons in his back yard in efforts to support a Clinton-era conspiracy theory involving Vince Foster and a wild alleged murder plot.

So much for the mainstream genesis and appeal of this bill.

Naturally, the Tin Foil Hatters scoff at any notion that Rep. Posey's legislation is an anti-Obama action. No, this is actually for him, they say.

One wonders, though, why this never came up with the 43 previous presidents, and whether they would be pushing the same bill if John McCain, who was born at a military base in the Panama Canal Zone, had been elected.

Our guess is a big no. Our guess also is that, despite all evidence to the contrary and the issue having been settled for rational beings, the death knell for this bogus birth certificate issue isn't close to happening.