General Merrill “Tony” McPeak, USAF (Ret.), Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, USAF (Ret.), and Richard Danzig, Former Secretary of the Navy saw fit to denounce the chain email and weigh in on the topic of Obama's patriotism with a letter of their own.

Just for the record, Robert Gibb, Communications Director of the Obama campaign, released the following two photos of Obama with his hand over his heart during recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance.

This statement is a mistaken reference to Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison.

Barack Obama's father (also named Barack Obama) was born on the shores of Lake Victoria in Alego, Kenya. Although the elder Obama was raised as a Muslim, no evidence supports the claim that he was ever a "radical Muslim," and Senator Obama's family histories note that his father was an atheist or agnostic (i.e., no longer a practicing Muslim) by the time he married the younger Obama's mother. Barack Obama himself has repeatedly acknowledged that his parents split up when he was two years old and that he scarcely knew his father: My father was almost entirely absent from my childhood, having been divorced from my mother when I was two years old. At the time of his death, my father remained a myth to me, both more and less than a man. He had left Hawaii back in 1963, when I was only two years old, so that as a child I knew him only through the stories that my mother and grandparents told. (Barack's only other childhood contact with his father occurred when he was eleven years old, and his father came to visit Hawaii for a month at Christmastime.)