Yearn for a conspiracy theory uniting Obama and the royal wedding? Yearn no more

WITH the bride just about in sight, we were almost out of time. Then a coiffed QC saved the day.

Geoffrey Robertson in Fairfax's National Times yesterday:

It is an open secret at the Commonwealth Secretariat that they do not want Charles III to be the next head of the Commonwealth when the Queen retires -- they are looking for someone more inspiring. Mandela, once the favourite candidate, is now too old. But there is an even better candidate whose name is being mentioned as an alternative to Charles in due course, namely ex-President Obama, with his Kenyan ancestry (as some believe, Kenyan birth). There are rumours that the palace's refusal to invite him to the wedding was neither oversight nor overslight but a fear that Barack and Michelle would appear to the "black Commonwealth" as superior to Charles and Camilla as future leaders of the Commonwealth.

Rightio. The Associated Press had another theory on April 23:

Palace officials said that only crowned heads of states are traditionally invited to royal weddings and that political leaders who are not from the 54-member Commonwealth of nations, such as President Barack Obama or French President Nicolas Sarkozy, weren't sent invitations.

FactCheck.org may also struggle to sniff out a conspiracy:

It's common for American presidents to attend official state visits at the invitation of the Queen but rare for them to attend royal weddings -- even when they got invitations -- so it would not be unusual if the Obamas did not attend. . . . President Truman did not attend [then] Princess Elizabeth's wedding . . . President Eisenhower and first lady Mamie Eisenhower were not invited to Princess Margaret's wedding . . . President Nixon did not attend Princess Anne's wedding.

From one extreme . . . Germany's Der Spiegel on Wednesday:

The wedding of William and Kate on Friday will be a joke, a hopelessly overhyped celebration of an absurdly undemocratic system, writes Spiegel London correspondent Marco Evers. He pities the bride for her imminent loss of freedom, and wonders why this eccentric nation continues to worship the Windsors.

. . . to another. The Age whips itself into quite a lather across its front page in letters nearly as big as corgis yesterday:

At exactly 7.51pm today, the photogenic commoner with the glossy dark locks, dimples and high voltage smile will step into the Queen's Rolls-Royce Phantom IV bound for Westminster Abbey -- to become the most watched woman in the world.

Back to the US President. Donald Trump on Wednesday on his role in persuading Barack Obama to show his birth certificate says, er, exactly what Obama always said it did:

Today I'm very proud of myself because I've accomplished something that nobody else has been able to accomplish.

Jerry Seinfeld on US TV show Extra on Thursday:

I love Donald Trump, all comedians love Donald Trump. If God gave comedians the power to invent people, the first person we would invent is Donald Trump . . .

[He is] God's gift to comedy.

You know who is to blame, of course. ABC NewsRadio's John Barron tackling the Obama birth certificate business on The Drum yesterday:

As newsrooms in the US and elsewhere are stripped of journalists, and those who remain become cut-price commentators who trawl the internet for a controversial issue to shovel into the 24-hour news cycle, stories like this one, as provably wrong as it is, will rise again like the undead. The internet is full of sites spouting crackpot ideas, but why should some of us in the media fan the flame?

Wendy Kaminer in The Atlantic on Wednesday:

President Obama's decision to release his long-form birth certificate is a reminder of the handicaps under which rational people labour when confronting the irrational.

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