There's another unsurprising front in the battle to contain the Ebola outbreak — the rash of conspiracy theories piling up as the deadly virus rages on. And they are bizarre.

One of the latest comes from Phyllis Schlafly, who in an interview last week said President Obama purposefully allowed Ebola to enter the United States so the country would be more like Africa. "Obama doesn’t want America to believe that we’re exceptional,” Schlafly said. “He wants us to be just like everybody else, and if Africa is suffering from Ebola, we ought to join the group and be suffering from it, too."

Rush Limbaugh just days earlier said Obama welcomed Ebola here as payback for slavery, or something. It's hard to connect the train of though here, but the conservative commentator basically posits that the U.S. doesn't have tighter travel restrictions because Liberia was founded by freed slaves, so there's some kind of guilt factor.

Sadly, it's not all that surprising that the political fringes try to exploit a major public health crisis. And you can always rely on the Internet to cook up its own conspiracies. For instance, did you hear that a 17-year-old episode of "The Simpsons" correctly predicted this Ebola outbreak?

Then there's singer Chris Brown — 

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/13/the-inevitable-rise-of-ebola-conspiracy-theories