Birthers

The press has mostly moved on from the question of whether President Obama was born in Hawaii or not. Donald Trump kicked the hornet's nest and got some people worked up about the question, but most people accept that the two birth certificates (short form and long form) released by the Prez are the real thing.

However, I was over at World Net Daily earlier today and notice that they are running an unscientific poll of their readers asking where they think Obama was born. 67% say Kenya. 3% say Hawaii.

Again, this is a voluntary reader poll, with self-selected responders, making it scientifically pointless. But what's fascinating when you read the comments section is that for many of these people, the absense of evidence is the strongest proof, and the presense of of evidence is the ultimate disproof. There are no records of a Kenyan birth certificate, or of Stanley Anne Dunham (Obama's mother) ever travelling to Kenya. The fact that these records can't be found is proof of how damning they were. On the other hand, within days of the long form birth certificate being produced, the folks at WND were declaring it a fake. The fact that he bothered to fake a birth certificate is the ultimate proof of his Kenyan birth, right? The fact that his birth was announced in the newspapers days after he was born is also proof of his foreign origins, since this shows that his grandparents were eager to make their grandson appear to be a legitimate American citizen.

What's most interesting is the curious presumption that Barack Obama's minders possess superhuman competence in some areas, and are horrible bumblers in others. Team Obama was clever enough to plant the birth announcements almost five decades before Obama ran for president, but too stupid to double check the spelling on the stamp used to certify the birth certificate! (If you aren't following this, the birth certificate is stamped at the bottom with a rubber stamp. WND has blown up the stamp and there's a THE in the stamp that looks like TXE. But, it's plainly a rubber stamp with uneven amounts of ink on the various letters. An H turns vaguely into an X if there's less ink in the middle of the outer lines.) Anyway, this supposed typo is just one of about 30 bits of "evidence" they have that the certificate is fake. So, team Obama is competent enough to scrub every bit of evidence on two continents dating back to the 1960's, but incompetent enough to release a document with 30 different mistakes.

Sometimes, all you can do is shake your head and sigh.