You know sometimes if you want something to be true hard enough, the need to make it true to satisfy your longing begins to overwhelm any good sense or judgment and sometimes you do stupid things out of desparation. You want it so bad, you'll do anything. Like the people of the right wing blog echo chamber who wanted so terribly bad not to have to wake up one morning with Obama in the White House that many of them became prime bait for Nigerian scammers who claimed they had exactly what they wanted-- an audio tape of Michelle Obama stating that she and her husband know that Barack isn't a US citizen and is running for president against constitutional law.

Does such a tape exist? Of course it doesn't. But for all the hard work Nigerian scammers normally have to do to try and dupe people out of tens of thousands of dollars, this was like shooting fish in a barrel. All you have to do is set up a fake news organization and claim that you have such a tape and demand that you'll release it for the right price and watch the money roll in. Easy as pie.

In a nutshell, here's how it was done:

A group of scammers set up a really bad Wordpress blog that was supposedly the home of African Press International (API).

From this site, they announced that they were in possession of an audio tape on which Michelle Obama supposedly admitted that she and her husband were aware that he is not actually a US citizen and therefore not eligible to run for president.

The right wing blogosphere quickly picked up on this and as the yelling grew louder to release the tape, the API announced that it would only release the tape for $25,000.

This quickly spiraled into bids of over $2 million for the tape... conservatives began pooling money through conservative blogs as the story blew up into this whole sordid tale of how the API was and then was not in negotiations with Fox News to release it.

And in the end... everyone got duped. But to this very day, you can still hear people yelling about this tape, but it's pure bullshit. Just a scam to make a few Nigerians very, very rich.

Click here for all the sordid details. Hard News, Inc. has done a brilliant job of sorting it all together.