The following is an adapted excerpt from The Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, by Eric Boehlert.

As compiled by blogger Jon Swift, these were just some of the Obama conspiracies that prominent conservative bloggers and weblogs pursued and hyped, at times relentlessly, during the 2008 presidential campaign:

1. While attending Columbia University in the early 1980s and interested in the South African divestiture movement, Obama was involved in violent protests, including domestic terrorist bombings, that erupted when a South African rugby team toured America. (Just One Minute, Ace of Spades)

2. Obama had an affair with a young female staffer who was promptly exiled to a Caribbean island by an angry Michelle Obama, who discovered the blossoming relationship. (Ace of Spades, Say Anything, Right Voices, Protein Wisdom, Hill Buzz, Black Five)

3. Obama’s deeply personal memoir, Dreams from My Father, was actually ghostwritten by Bill Ayers, the former ’60s radical turned college professor who befriended Obama in Chicago in the 1990s. (American Thinker, Ann Althouse, Powerline, Flopping Aces)

4. Obama was not born in the United States, and therefore not eligible to be president. The birth certificate his campaign posted online to debunk that story was actually a forgery. He was born in Kenya. (Atlas Shrugs, Right Wing News, Andrew McCarthy, Gateway Pundit, WorldNetDaily)

5. When Obama went to visit his ailing grandmother in Hawaii in October, he was really traveling there in order to deal with the controversy about his bogus birth certificate. (Stop the ACLU)

6. Obama, when he was nine years old, may have had sex with a grown man who was “a suspected commie pervert.” (Dan Riehl, Confederate Yankee, Jules Crittenden)

7. A Minnesota man claimed he took cocaine in 1999 with Obama and participated in homosexual acts with him. (Jawa Report, WND)

8. Obama was getting answers in the first presidential debate through a clear plastic hearing aid in his ear. (Ann Althouse)

9. Obama was the illegitimate son of Malcolm X. (Atlas Shrugs)

As Swift noted, “Just because there is no evidence that something is true, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” which seemed to capture the conservative bloggers’ motto for much of the election season.

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