This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

I know, it seems outrageous, But it's getting a lot of attention on some very respectable Web pages — which mainstream media won't mention:

Donald Trump was not born in Queens,

He was born in the Philippines,

In a hotel in downtown Manila.

Where his hair turned bright vanilla

Due to vitamin deficiencies.

His mom and dad were Celanese

And left him with Franciscan nuns

At the age of fourteen months.

Adopted on the 3rd of June

By a real estate tycoon

Who took the little boy away

To a mansion in the U.S.A.

Bestowing on him great largesse

And naturalized him more or less.

The record of his nativity

Is kept under lock and key

With his tax returns, the MRIs

Showing what's behind his eyes

Including, according to rumor,

A diverticulated tumor.

I hope it isn't true, although

It comes from folks who ought to know.

A week ago, a panhandler in Times Square sat holding a sign, "Give me a dollar or I'll vote for Trump," and people laughed and reached into their pockets. His bucket overflowed. He stuffed the bills into his jacket and other panhandlers looked at him with admiration. The man could've sold franchises and retired to Palm Beach.

The panhandler knows what every New Yorker knows, which is that the biggest con job since the Trojan horse is taking place in our midst. Millions of Americans are planning to cast their votes for a man who has lived his life contrary to all of their most cherished values. They are respectful, honest, generous, loyal, modest, church-going people with no Mafia connections and good credit records who try not to spout off about things they know nothing about.

His followers out on the prairie were brought up to be wary of slick-talking New Yorkers and here they are, falling right into line behind the biggest braggart ever to hit the sawdust trail. It's going to be an education for them, watching him cut taxes while expanding the military and building a wall and deporting 11 million people. In America, you can't send gendarmes through the streets to round up people in trucks and load them on boxcars and ship them away. There is a judicial process. Lawyers are involved. People have certain rights.

His boast after the Manhattan pressure-cooker bombing Saturday night was revelatory. "I called it!" he cried on Fox, as he had after the Orlando, Florida, nightclub shootings. It would've been classier for him to have congratulated New York's Finest but instead he took it as a personal coup.

What the bombing showed was the courage and smarts of the NYPD, arriving on the scene in time to defuse a second bomb, identify the suspect, and track him down Monday morning. "We've got to be very, very tough," cried the candidate out in Colorado, but back in New York, the work was being done by men who know how to do it.

Ah, chutzpah! There was once a mayor of New York who overruled the NYPD and the Secret Service and put the city's Emergency Command Center on the 23rd floor of the World Trade Center, and whose emergency plan for the towers led to massive confusion and miscommunication, some desperate people directed to climb up, others told to stay put, as the mayor stood in the streets below and urged residents to be calm, and thereby became a national hero and started his own security consulting company. This is like the captain of the Titanic, had he survived, writing a book called The Art of Navigation. The mayor is now a close Trump adviser.

Trump is a man whom few Republicans would care to invite into their homes. So what's going on here? An epidemic of hippocampus poisoning from bad enzymes in cheap beers? The man is a fraud, a tax cheat, a compulsive liar, a clueless playboy, and his presidency would be an unmitigated disaster for the country. If you would make us the laughingstock of the world just to irk your liberal sister-in-law, you are someone who should not be allowed to come within five-hundred yards of an elementary school.

The success of Trump will show our children the exact value of education, which is: not that much. It will mean that fact-based journalism has very little bearing in America and a Manila-born Celanese child can aspire to the highest office in the land. So here's a dollar in the beggar's hat. Good luck to democracy. Hang in there.