More than ever, birthers are having a hard time being taken seriously. Since the release of Obama's long-form birth certificate last April, the birther faithful have mostly hung their hats on trying to prove that the certificate released by the White House is a “forgery” based on things like smudged stamp ink.

Earlier this month, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio held a press conference announcing the findings of the “cold case posse” he had assembled to investigate the certificate and declared that there was reason to believe it is a forgery. Media coverage of the event took on an appropriately mocking tone, leading Arpaio to complain, “The media all came to make fun of me.” Arpaio even labeled the media downplaying birther concerns to be a conspiracy “bigger than Watergate.”

If birthers are frustrated that nobody takes them seriously, their latest big story, which is premised on stories told by Bill Ayers' parents' former postman (not a typo), is certainly not going to help matters.

In what is probably the biggest mail-related flop since Kevin Costner's The Postman, WorldNetDaily supersleuth and Where's The Birth Certificate? author Jerome Corsi is out with a new report today suggesting the Ayers family paid for “foreigner” Obama's education.

The allegations are based on Corsi's conversations with former USPS postman Allen Hulton, who says that he used to deliver mail to Bill Ayers' parents in a Chicago suburb in the late 80s and early 90s. This should prove to be rock-solid.

According to Hulton and his impressive penchant for remembering decades-old small talk, Bill Ayers' mother once boasted about “this young black student they were helping out, and she referred to him as a foreign student.” Hulton also explains that Mary Ayers gave him the student's name, but, as Corsi writes, “it was a 'strange name' that he could not remember, even though at the time it sounded African to him.”

Though he couldn't remember the exact student's name, Hulton does “believe she said he was from either Kenya or Indonesia, and I favor Indonesia in my recollection.” Uh huh.

Hulton also claims to have once met Obama himself outside the Ayers home. According to Hulton, “He was very polite, dressed nicely, but informally - slacks and a dress shirt - and he spoke with no accent. Immediately this young black man entered into conversation with me. He told me he had taken the train out from Chicago and had come to thank the Ayers family personally for having helped him with his education.”

After Hulton asked Obama what his plans were after he finished school, Obama revealed that his presidency may have “already been pre-arranged” through his confident tone and vaguely Indonesian grinning [emphasis added]:

Hulton remembers asking the young man what his plans were for the future.

“He looked right at me and told me he was going to be president of the United States,” Hulton says.

“There was a little bit of a grin on his face when he said it - he sounded sure of himself, but not arrogant. I know how people will say things because they have an ambition, but it did not come across that way,” Hulton says. “It came across as if this young black male was telling me he was going to be president, almost as if it were the statement of a scientific fact that had already been determined, as if his being president had been already pre-arranged.”

WND doesn't attempt to spell out what Hulton means here, but Hulton certainly sounds like he is suggesting that Obama revealed to him that there was a larger plan afoot that would eventually result in this confident young maybe-Indonesian becoming president.

Birther conspiracists apparently occupy a reality where the conversations a postman claims he had with President Obama and Bill Ayers' parents two decades ago hold more weight than the overwhelming evidence he was born in the U.S. (the long-form certificate, newspaper announcements, etc. etc.).

As always, this is all farcical and amusing, but allegations like these are still treated seriously by people like Matt Drudge, who is currently featuring the Corsi story on his site:

(Top image from front page of WND.com)