The charge that Barack Obama was not born in America is a quintessential conservative media moment, an attempt to provide some factual basis for bigotry. The birthers “felt” that a black man named Barack Hussein Obama could not truly be an American, so a cottage industry was born attempting to “prove” a lie. That it was demonstrably a lie backed by hospital records was quickly brushed aside in pursuit of the “larger” truth that Barack Obama wasn’t “really” an American because an America that could elect a man with the middle name Hussein is not really America. The
