It’s getting harder and harder to be a skeptic in this era of high-tech achievements that border on science fiction, but if you’re creative enough and audacious enough, you can doubt anything.

President Obama has just tossed out two pieces of red meat for the skeptics. One is his long-form Hawaiian birth certificate, designed to refute charges by “birthers” that he was born outside the United States and therefore is not legally entitled to be president. The other is his announcement that Osama bin Laden has been killed by a team of Navy Seals, and his body is in American hands.

When a president stands up on national television and tells you Laden is dead, and his predecessor in office beams in agreement, it’s hard to be skeptical. But if you’re a dedicated birther and Obama basher, you can rise to the occasion.

For instance: If Laden is truly dead and his body is actually in American hands, why wasn’t it shown on national television? Is it possible that no body exists? Or that the man Obama thinks is Laden is actually a ringer?

Why wasn’t the DNA evidence produced? Horatio on CSI Miami can ask his pretty blonde subordinate to smear a little DNA on Afis (whatever that is), and pronto the gadget will produce a mug of the suspect, complete with current address and SSN. Why doesn’t the White House have this technology.

If I were a skeptic, which of course I’m not, I would speculate on two possibilities, both of which are probably correct:

Scenario 1: Laden got tired of living on the run and located a double who was a dead ringer for the terrorist. He then set him up with a mansion in Pakistan, complete with 70 virgins for company, and passed the word to the CIA that he was there and waiting for them.

The CIA told the Pentagon, the Pentagon told Obama, and Obama ordered in the Seals. The dead ringer was eliminated immediately, and promptly went to join the pilots of the suicide planes and all the suicide bombers who had died gloriously in the service of Allah, and was rewarded with another set of 70 virgins. Osama then shaved, donned a suit from Men’s Wearhouse, and caught a plane for Caracas. From there, he made his way up the Isthmus to the American border, where he passed for Hugh Hefner and moved into the Playboy Mansion. He now is ensconced with a house full of non-virgins, living in the lap of luxury on welfare and enjoying the benefits of Obamacare.

Scenario 2: Obama needed something to juice up his campaign for re-election. The birth-certificate ploy was a dud, because the people who believe he was born in Kenya still believe it and think he was disingenuous in producing a birth certificate, while those who believe he was born in Hawaii still believe it and think he was stupid for making such a big deal of a non-issue.

So to jump-start his campaign, Obama sent a crew to Bellevue to locate a recently deceased derelict who could be made up to look like the terrorist. They found one and sent it to Afghanistan, and there proclaimed it to be the real Osama.

The birther issue is easier to answer. Already the honest skeptics have been examining the putative birth certificate under an electron microscope, and here’s what they found:

The name of the hospital on the birth certificate is an anachronism. The certificate says the future president was born on Aug. 4, 1961 at  Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu. But Kukamonga Wickywacky, a real native of Hawaii, remembers that the hospital was known by another name at the time of Obama’s birth, so the birth certificate has to be phony.

It’s true that the hospital’s website, not to mention the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, maintain that the hospital had been known by that name since the early ’30s.

The probable truth: Obama sent his old friend Bill Ayers back into the past to insert a birth announcement into the Honolulu Advertiser so that in the 21st century  the newspaper would provide “proof” that the president was a native Hawaiian. While he was mucking around in the past, Ayers changed the name of the hospital retroactively.

Meanwhile, Harry Kikuyu, a second-generation African-American, maintains that the birth certificate couldn’t be authentic because it listed the president’s father’s homeland as “Kenya, East Africa,” when everybody but the president knows that Kenya went by a different name back then. But wait. The history books now tell us that Kenya became the Crown Colony of Kenya in 1920, 41 years before Obama’s birth, and achieved independence as the Republic of Kenya when the future president was 2.

Obviously, Ayers, or somebody, monkeyed with the history texts, too.

My own conclusion, after consulting the Redneck Institute of Bullfeathers, a think tank consisting of a keg of Bud Light, is that President Obama was really born in the Islamic Republic of Itchystan. You won’t find it in any atlas, because his henchmen have expunged any mention of it from reference books. It is, in my opinion, situated midway between Yemen and Noman. And where is Noman? According to a reliable source, geographer John Donne, “Noman is an island,” probably in the Persian Gulf.

Anyhow, Itchystan practices Sharia Law, which provides that anyone failing to bow toward Mecca seven times a day shall be beheaded with a dull machete. Both Obama and Osama were born there, and in fact are second cousins, as indicated by the similarity of their names.

That’s why Obama has embedded Sharia law into Obamacare. If you Google Obamacare, you will find the provision in Chapter 13, verse 666. If you don’t believe me, look it up in Snopes.

If you do believe me, let me know immediately and I’ll recommend a good shrink. 

Readers may write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625 or at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.