Opinion: Was Obama born to Muslim Martians with plans to seize Temecula?

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This week’s provocative New Yorker magazine cover featuring Barack and Michelle Obama as armed and Muslim calls attention to a variety of myths floating around the country these days, mainly online, but also openly voiced.

To check on what you hear, the website snopes.com is valuable. It tracks and debunks urban legends of the e-mail variety. It could be the first place you go when that unexpected message pings into your inbox from another e-mail chain.

You can also search Snopes for more myths or alleged truths about others such as Sens. John McCain (he did tell a story once about a fellow POW in Hanoi who got beaten for sewing a U.S. flag on his prison shirt) or John Kerry (his photo does hang in a Vietnamese Peace Museum for being a war protester).

According to the site, here are the top myths about Barack Obama:

• He is a ‘radical Muslim’ who will not recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
• He was sworn into office on the Koran.
• Obama’s church has a ‘nonnegotiable commitment to Africa’ that is covertly Muslim and excludes non-blacks.
• Obama has been endorsed for president of the U.S. by the Ku Klux Klan.
• Obama’s presidential campaign is being funded by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez.

For the rest of the mythical Obama list, check out our colleague James Oliphant’s intriguing story over at the Swamp.

-- Andrew Malcolm