Investigating the roots of the Obama birthplace conspiracy theory, John Avlon—author of Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America, available now on Beast Books—uncovers the first Birther and finds she's a Hillary Clinton supporter also implicated in Dan Rather's exit from CBS.

"I determined that I was going to start digging up every bit of dirt that I could find on him and…convince the Democratic Party to dump him and make Hillary the nominee."

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Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe is Hijacking America. By John Avlon. 304 Pages. Beast Books. $15.95. But there's an inconvenient truth liberals are going to have to confront: The Birthers began not on the right, but on the left.

Investigations for my new book, Wingnuts, revealed that the Birther conspiracy theory was first concocted by renegade members of the original Obama haters, Party Unity My Ass, known more commonly by their acronym, the PUMAs. http://pumaparty.com/vb/puma-talking-point... They were a splinter group of hard-core Hillary Clinton supporters who did not want to give up the ghost after the bitter 50-state Bataan Death March to the 2008 Democratic nomination.

In the early summer of '08, message boards on sites like PUMAParty.com began lighting up with the ultimate reversal-of-fortune fantasy—that their party's nomination could be overturned on constitutional grounds. "Obama May Be Illegal to Be Elected President!" read one representative e-mail: "This came from a USNA alumnus. It'll be interesting to see how the media handle this...WRITE TO YOUR LOCAL newspaper editors etc. Keep this out there everyday possible. Also write to the DNC too!"

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