I appreciated this article because I have been the repeated recipient of several anti-Obama e-mails. On the face of it, these seemed to be poorly sourced polemics, and Snopes.com verified that they were total fabrications. However, when I e-mailed those who sent them (well-educated, normally well-informed relatives), informing them that the e-mails were false and requesting that they correct the record, I ran into quite a lot of resistance--one even claiming that "those Snopes people are all under Obama's spell." So the next time I receive one of these e-mails I will also be able to link to this article, which effectively discusses their genesis. Of course all this is nothing new. Contemporaneous stories about the illicit affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings were all the rage during his 1800 presidential campaign--except that genetic testing has revealed that those stories were probably true.