Kissing Cousins

As the colleagues over at The Speccie point out it appears that Obama and Dick Cheney are in fact cousins.

The thing is, they're 8th cousins, the common ancestor having been around in 1700 or so. Given the extremely small size of the European settlement in the US at that time I'd be surprised if most Americans who actually had ancestors landed by that time were not related to some similar level of consanguinity.

Still that sort of musing aside, nothing will stop the howling moonbats:

I think she means that Dick’s family used to own Barack’s family.
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So… eight generations ago a Cheney master raped an Obama slave and that makes Dick and Barack cousins?
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So basically she’s saying that Dick Cheney’s family were a bunch of rich southern aristocratic types who didn’t want to pay taxes and owned slaves. Sick.

All hugely amusing of course, for one of the points that has been made elsewhere is that Obama is not actually "black" in the American sense as he is not descended from slaves, from those who were owned, but his father being a first generation immigrant from Africa. What's even more amusing is that the last comment there was posted after this had been pointed out, that the common ancestor was through Obama's mother, a white woman from the Plains.

But then it's not uncommon for prejudice to brush aside facts now, is it?