Mother Jones’ Conspiracy Collection

THANKS TO my man Al Olson, for a Facebook alert to this gem from Mother Jones. Asawin Suebsaeng and Dave Gilson, two staffers at the plucky progressive magazine, took the time to cobble together all the prevailing conspiracy theories surrounding the 44th president of the United States, and arrange them in a Web site graphic that puts it all into perspective. So you don’t have to, thank God.

What hasn’t Barack Obama been to these people? Is there any disaster in the last four years they aren’t prepared to lay at his jackbooted feet? The MJ illustration is a kind of graphical “Intolerance’s Greatest Hits.” To go by the contents of this Venn diagram for extremists, Obama’s guilty of everything from not writing his own love letters to killing his grandmother to conceal his birth.

Obama wears a ring bearing verses from the Koran, you know, and he’s got the Oval Office tricked out in Middle Eastern style. He had conservative blogger/firebrand Andrew Breitbart offed and ginned up Hurricane Sandy with a Pentagon weather modification program, the better to make him look good in the days before Tuesday’s election.

Oh yeah — he went to Mars as a teenager, too.

Suebsaeng and Gilson came at this with just the right presentational sense of over-the-top, but the sad truth behind one of the most on-point conservative skewerings in recent memory is … it’s all real. The diagram’s conspiratorial assertions are pulled from the right-wing media echo chamber, where various lies, damn lies and Fox News stories have for years helped to build the conservative’s dream: Barack Obama as Other.

In an age of information overload, the duo at Mother Jones has rendered the American public a great service of time-saving, the convenience of a one-stop shop for extremist Obama memes.

It’s interesting to see just how crazy conservative crazy really is when it’s laid out on one page.

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Image credits: Obama Conspiracy-o-Rama by Asawin Suebsaeng and Dave Gilson/Mother Jones. © 2012 Mother Jones.