The White House's release of President Obama's birth certificate earlier this week happened to coincide with the publication of records from the 1960s regarding the immigration status of one Barack Obama Sr. Those records do not paint a flattering portrait of the president's father, detailing at length Harvard University's concerns over his womanizing, overlapping marriages, and financial troubles.

It would seem, however, that the personal failings of Barack Obama Sr. are transferable to his son. From the Daily Mail, via Fox Nation:

With a father like this, it is little wonder President Obama did not want to release his full birth certificate.

Though the proof that he was actually born in Hawaii may silence some critics, a new, rather more interesting side of his life has emerged - that his father Barack Obama senior was a serial womaniser and polygamist who government and university officials were trying to force out of the country.

Obama senior married Stanley Ann Dunham, a white student from Kansas, not only when he was said to have already been married to a woman in Kenya, but at a time when interracial marriages were still illegal in many parts of the U.S.

Mother Jones observes:

Now that denial isn't much of an option, the anger stage has kicked in: Birtherism has given way to fear-of-a-virile-black-man-ism. If you navigated last night to the front page of Fox Nation, a Fox News-run website, you'd have found this lead story, splashed with a grainy photo of Barack Obama Sr.: "'A Slippery Character': New Details Emerge About Obama's Father."

What follows is a roughly 1,100-word hatchet job, offering few actual new details, to confirm what President Obama had already stated in his memoir: His dad wasn't the greatest of guys.

[...]

This certainly has it all: polygamy, the suggestion of illicit interracial sex, and the predatory sexual appetites of a dark-skinned African man.

My one quibble with this is the suggestion that the fearmongering around Obama's father's checkered past is a new development. Four years ago, Fox News ran wild with a report from the Daily Mail -- the same paper that Fox Nation linked to yesterday -- that Obama had lied about his father's past in Dreams from My Father by concealing the senior Obama's bigamy and alcoholism. It was completely untrue: Obama addressed both in Dreams. Nonetheless, Fox News' John Gibson said the paper “exposed a different Barack Obama Sr. -- a wife-beating alcoholic who didn't bother to get a divorce before marrying the next woman and having a few more kids.”

Dinesh D'Souza's execrable The Roots Of Obama's Rage argues that Obama inherited an “anti-colonial” mindset from his African father and grandfather. Glenn Beck asked last year: “What is Barack Obama's dream? You have to ask yourself: what were the dreams of his father? Marxism.” Just a few days ago, Andrew Breitbart's Big Government posted a video purporting to expose how Obama's parents were both Marxists, and how this influenced the president's “character.”

They're trying to hold Obama accountable for the accident of heredity, using the sins of the father to make him seem foreign and untrustworthy. It's irredeemably ugly, and it's only getting worse.