Jerome Corsi, who penned a book about the alleged plot to create a confederation of the United States, Canada and Mexico, regaled listeners with tales of a conspiracy within the administration of President Barack Obama to give up U.S. sovereignty.

“The new tactic of North American integrationists is to change the name but keep the agenda going,” Corsi said. He told listener’s that officials within the Obama Administration are prominent supporters of the “integrationist” movement.

As the St. Louis Post Dispatch pointed out last year, fears of a North American Union began with a few grains of truth and leapt to an unsubstantiated conclusion, with the Internet and publications like World Net Daily spreading the urban legend around at breakneck speed. Even Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron, bought in.

Of course, North American Union claims have been widely discredited.

Next, Corsi and Mickelson turned their attention to Barack Obama’s birth certificate “controversy.”

“President Obama refuses to release his original birth certificate,” Corsi said, adding: “Hawaii claims to have a birth certificate that says Obama was born in Hawaii. I was in Hawaii, I hired a private investigator who went to all the hospitals… who were operating when Obama was born. None of them claim to have any record of Obama’s birth.”

This is an urban legend that Mickelson has returned to several times. However, multiple groups, FactCheck.org and Snopes.com among them, investigated the claims that Obama could not be president because he was born in Kenya and had citizenship in other countries, determining that he did in fact have a valid birth certificate from Hawaii. FactCheck even found a birth announcement for baby Barack Obama in a 1961 Honolulu newspaper.

Corsi is also known for co-authoring “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” a book filled with error-laden attacks on the military service record of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry; and “Obama Nation,”a book written to oppose Obama’s candidacy for president and described by FactCheck.org as “a mishmash of unsupported conjecture, half-truths, logical fallacies and outright falsehoods.”

The end of the afternoon program was a one man tour de force of Mickelson proclaiming the 14th Ammendment to the U.S. Constitution was never legally ratified, and thus, children of foreign born parents are not citizens of this country even if they are born here.

Amero coin design by Dan Carr, www.amerocurrency.com

The odds that King will buy into the greatest urban legend of all time greatly increased last month when he told constituents that he was connecting the dots on another popular conspiracy theory: the creation of a North American Union, a border-blurring confederation of the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The North American Union theory takes various forms depending on who’s doing the talking or blogging. Some incarnations involve a “superhighway” linking the nations, others a common currency often called the “amero.”

Rather than dismiss the idea the St. Louis Post Dispatch calls an “urban legend” — as Republicans like U.S. Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri have done — King gives it credibility by saying he can see a case for the plan appearing, dot by dot.

“My own view is that if you look at all of the signals that are there, look at the evidence that exists and all the dots, and you connect the dots, you can draw that picture,” King said at an Aug. 19 town hall meeting at Cronk’s Cafe Restaurant & Lounge in Denison.

From the exhaustive Post Dispatch story on the North American Union theory:

Forget conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination, black helicopters, Sept. 11, 2001. This is the big one.

We’re talking about the secret plan to build a superhighway, a giant 10- to 12-lane production, from the Yucatán to the Yukon. This “SuperCorridor” would allow the really big part of the plan to take place: the merging of the governments of Canada, the United States and Mexico. Say goodbye to the dollar, and maybe even the English language.

Texas Congressman Ron Paul famously trafficked in doom-and-gloom predictions about a superhighway and a union of the three nations in the Republican presidential primaries. Federal and state trade and highway officials said Paul’s claims were a paranoid fantasy.

U.S. Rep. Steve King

A Boston Globe story about the North American Union’s emergence as an issue at GOP town hall meeting described it this way: “If you haven’t heard about the NAU, that may be because its plotters have succeeded in keeping it secret. Or, more likely, because there is no such thing.”

King acknowledged that such a plan, which would involve ceding some national sovereignty, would be hard to accomplish surreptitiously. But he said he sees signs of a developing union in official U.S.-Mexican counter-terrorism discussions.

“The idea is to not worry so much about our interior border but to take our security out to our ocean borders,” King said.

King said any notion he had of waving off the issue of a North American Union as a joke vanished about a year ago when he heard former Mexican President Vicente Fox speak at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake.

“I actually have notes in my briefcase out in the vehicle from Vicente Fox’s speech,” King said.

It is telling that — of all the papers on all the issues that a congressman sees — King would take these “notes” along on a campaign swing.

“He [Fox] painted a picture of a North American Union,” King recalled. “And I listened to it and I thought this is the first time I’ve heard somebody of that stature talk so openly about an idea that will be rejected by the American people.”

Fox, who served as Mexican president from 2000 to 2006, no doubt gave North American Union-believers grist for their mills. I covered Fox in Storm Lake last October and this how I reported that portion of his remarks:

In the bigger picture, Fox advocated an economic system for the Americas that he envisions as operating something akin to the European Union. He said the United States clearly has a labor shortage and that a younger Mexico with a “mature” United States, in the demographics of age, have complementary economies. What’s more, Fox said, many of the Hispanics working in this nation and hailing from foreign places just want to make enough to live more comfortably in their homelands and aren’t viewing America as anything more than a wage-earning weigh station.

But it is a stretch to go from big-picture, lecture-circuit, book-selling speeches (where Fox also sought to make news by endorsing Hillary Clinton) to King’s dot-to-dot conspiracy involving current lawmakers and bureaucrats in all three nations.

King even buys into North American Union blogger-conspiracy theorists’ beliefs that a distribution area is being built in Kansas City to facilitate a superhighway of tri-nation traffic (peddled by, for instance, Jerome Corsi).

“You look at the location in Kansas City that looks like it’s going to be a distribution warehouse that is port of entry, those things are pretty compelling,” King said.

(Photo: Sign at a Ron Paul event in Ames, Iowa, August 10, 2007)

If the questions Mitt Romney receives at campaign events in Iowa are any indication, there is a great deal of concern in the state at the level of the Republican base about the possibility of America, Canada, and Mexico merging into one nation, and also about a proposed superhighway allegedly slated to run from Mexico to Canada, passing through Iowa on the way. Today, The Nation’s Christopher Hayes drills deep into the story of the NAFTA Superhighway and finds it to be a conspiracy theory of the first order — yet one that is based on real worries people have about the way multi-national corporations are increasingly invested in America’s infrastructure sector and taking advantage of globalization to avoid American labor laws and security regulations. Writes Hayes:

When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation’s Wal-Marts.

And this NAFTA Superhighway, as it is called, is just the beginning, the first stage of a long, silent coup aimed at supplanting the sovereign United States with a multinational North American Union….

Prompted by angry phone calls and e-mail from their constituents, local legislators are beginning to take action. In February the Montana state legislature voted 95 to 5 for a resolution opposing “the North American Free Trade Agreement Superhighway System” as well as “any effort to implement a trinational political, government entity among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.” Similar resolutions have been introduced in eighteen other states as well as the House of Representatives, where H. Con Res. 40 has attracted, as of this writing, twenty-seven co-sponsors. Republican presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire now routinely face hostile questions about the highway at candidate forums. Citing a spokesperson for the Romney campaign, the Concord Monitor reports that “the road comes up at town meetings second only to immigration policy.”

Grassroots movement exposes elite conspiracy and forces politicians to respond: It would be a heartening story but for one small detail.

There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway.

Read the whole thing here.