Persistence pays off. Six months into the election of President Barack Obama, the unsubstantiated, unfactual and unenlightened belief that President Obama was born in Kenya and not on the Hawaiian island of Oahu as his official birth certificate attests, has made it to the annual of “Seven Wonders That Defy Common Sense” list.
“The fact the people can look at his actual birth certificate and see in black and white that he is a U.S. citizen and still entertain the notion that he’s not a citizen after repeated documentation is what propels this particular idiocy of the American public to the Seven Wonders list,” list founder Jackie Chiles said.
Chiles said the Obama birth certificate belief replaced the 2008 “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” non sequitur uttered by John McCain just prior to the meltdown of the global economy.
Chiles said he began the list the night he heard then President Nixon announce, “I am not a crook,” on national television. “I remember saying to myself, ‘that defies common sense,’ and the list was born.”
Chiles said he chose to limit the list to just seven wonders both as a match to the more famous Seven Wonders of the World, and because in the era of television it seems the American people have become more gullible than ever before. “The numbers of things Americans are willing to believe without an iota of fact would make such a list infinite in length.”
Chiles said he has considered expanding the list beyond the seven-item limit, especially during what he describes as periods of manifest deception that in his words, “would have made Orwell spin in his grave.”
“When Clinton looked us straight in the eye and wagged his finger and said, ‘I did not have sex with that woman,’ and then later tried to suggest multiple meanings of the verb ‘is,’ I told myself seven is not going to be enough for this administration.
“And then came the Bush-Cheney years and between WMD, ‘we don’t torture,’ and the “we kept America safe since9/11 howler, I thought to myself, Wow, I’m either going to have to extend the list or develop a second one.”
Since the list’s inception, Chiles has wondered why no one had thought of creating a list prior to his.
“When a country is built on the twin foundations of slavery and disenfranchised women, yet still has the temerity to declare, “All men are created equal,” and do it in permanent ink without cracking a smile, I can’t believe why someone like Franklin or Paine didn’t track this nonsense from the beginning.”
Chiles is confident his list will last well into the future of the country. “I recently heard a U.S. Senator say with a straight face that the United States has the ‘best healthcare system in the world.’ You just can’t imagine something like that until you’ve actually heard it expressed, you know?”
