The tin-foil hat brigade is at it again, and this time, they’re claiming presidential hopeful Barack Obama never went to Columbia University, despite his public statements to the contrary.

In a post entitled “Did Barack Obama go to Columbia,” the ring leader of this three-ringed conspiracy circus, Mencius Moldbug, suggests that Obama lied about attending Columbia in order to cover up his ulterior motives for being in New York City during the early 1980s.

His smoking gun? Nobody from Obama’s graduating class (1983) remembers him.

Furthermore, in every other period of his life, he is known as the gregarious and charismatic young man he obviously was. Nor can his looks be described as ordinary. Nor is even his name ordinary. This man is a future president. And no one remembers him? No one?

[…] If we rule out the impossible, we have to accept the improbable. In my mind, knowing what I know (if anyone has better information, hopefully they will post it in the comments), it is close enough to impossible that Barack Obama went to Columbia, that I'm willing to say the unsayable and theorize about what else might have happened. Yes, I realize that this makes me a racist.

My guess is that young Barry dropped out of Occidental in '81, not to go to Columbia, but to go to New York and be a black revolutionary bohemian.

Let’s assume that Moldbug is correct in his gross assumption based on little more than an incessant need to discredit Obama’s otherwise pristine character.

Does this change anything? No. Obama still went to Harvard Law, met his wife, fought for his community and went on to become the man he is today.

Maybe the conspiracy theorists should stop living in the Past and join the rest of us in the Present -- for once.