From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone is off. I'm Bob Garfield.

Hey, what if we were governed by a sinister foreigner masquerading as a native-born American,

a real-life Manchurian candidate advancing a perverse plan to cull the population of the elderly.

That's either a plot for a bad Hollywood thriller or this week in the wingnottosphere.

I wouldn't know why are you people ignoring his first certificate.

It is not an American citizen.

He is a citizen of America.

That's from a YouTube video of a Delaware town hall meeting with Congressman Mike Castle,

a video that has flown all over the internet and cable news, fomenting right-wing rage over an imposter in the White House. Of course, the president has long since provided

his birth certificate and contemporaneous Honolulu newspapers back in 1961, announcing his

bouncing baby birth.

But that's not good enough for the birthers, as they've come to be called.

Some of them are fringe loonies.

Some of them are members of Congress, such as the 11 Republican co-sponsors, of a bill that would

require future presidential candidates to present a U.S. birth certificate in order to run.

And some of them are CNN's Lou Dobbs.

It's a lot of questions remaining, and seemingly the questions won't go away because they

haven't been dealt with.

So demonstrably false is this rumor that even some of the most caustic media voices on the

right have tried to

squelch it. Among them Fox News channels Bill O'Reilly, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, and columnists

...