This Kind Of Silliness

Last week, two major news bombshells where dropped. After three years of stonewalling Obama finally released his birth certificate, and Osama bin Laden was finally killed.

What amazes me about the way that the dust is settling on the birth certificate issue, is how the mainstream media (ie, Fox, CNN, MSNBC) are not skipping a beat in the way the are constructing their narrative. Virtually all of the major hosts, including Glen Beck and Bill O'Reilly are on the record years ago saying that the so called “birthers” were crazy because Obama had already released his birth certificate.

And now instead of saying “Woops, we're sorry. Turns out that Obama didn't provide source documentation for his eligibility to be President until now. Our bad.”, they are going on the offensive and saying, “See, you were wrong in your accusations all along.” This is troublesome, as almost all of the players who were pushing for the release of his birth certificate were not saying that he was definitively ineligible, but rather that he had not proved his eligibility with proper documentation. Now the talkers are mischaracterizing people like Joseph Farah and Alan Keyes just like they mischaracterized the certificate of live birth as being no different from a long form birth certificate.

The other troubling thing is how the long form birth certificate was immediately accepted with zero foristic analysis. When the president has spent three years and estimated millions of dollars of legal fees to hide a document, no sane person would believe that said document is not a fake without having experts comb over it first. Even then, unless we are offered some better explanation of why his birth certificate was not release sooner than “We do not have time for this kind of silliness”, it seems unlikely that it can ever be viewed without suspicion. Obama could have released his birth certificate, passports, college records, and all other relevant documents in less than a 10^th of the time that he has spent fighting court battles, and fending off questions in the press over these issues. There is an absolute end to the relevant documents that can be produced, and non of them should contain any damaging information if the president is to be believed. The fact that he has decided to hide all this information strongly suggests that he is hiding something. Does that mean that he is ineligible to serve? No, but it does strongly suggest that he is lying about something, and therefore we should not take his word about his birth certificate without first analyzing it.

The sad thing is once you do look at the birth certificate with a critical eye, it completely falls apart. The first problem is the obvious difference between the version released by the Associated Press and the version released by the White House. Both are presented as being either copies or photographs of the document. Neither one is was released with the disclaimer that it was some how modified for public viewing, but obviously one is printed on green safety paper, and the other is on white paper with no patterns. Either he went from not having any birth certificate to having two copies, or one of those has been altered on a computer. I haven't found too much on the AP's copy, but White house copy was certainly doctored, and fairly lazily as well. If you look through market-ticker's analysis, you might be able to write off some of the problems, but to my admittedly amateur knowledge, there is no way that a picture or a copy could cause the pixelation seen in the upper right hand corner of document. If you think that it may just be some guy who is pulling your chain, go to the origional document released on the whitehouse.gov site and see for yourself. A full 6 days later they are still brazenly displaying the same document with obvious problems.

So in this light, not a lot has changed. There is still plenty of reason to view Obama's birth with suspicion, and although this does not mean that he is not eligible to serve, it still means that he has not yet proved that he is.

And now as before, if the document is accurate, and they doctored it for no other reason than to mess with the American public, if we are to believe Obama's birth narrative, he's eligibility is still in question. It is not clearly defined in the constitution what it means to be a natural born citizen, but at the time of the adoption of that document, it was understood most likely to mean a person born to parents who are both citizens, and born in the country. In the case of John McCain it was decided that being born to 2 American parents on a military base was enough even though it was not inside the borders of the US. So it could be argued that being born to 1 American parent on US soil is enough for Obama, but the issue should be explored. As it is, the so called “birthers” are correct in believing that even though the law might not be broken, we don't know for sure and those people who are sworn to uphold it have not just failed in their duty but actively refused it.

For the second big bombshell, I'm not going to say too much. The dust is still settling, and it is premature to make definitive statements on it. However, I will say that it is somewhat jaw droppingly elitist for Obama to have dumped the Osama's body in the Ocean so soon after finding it. I don't have any reason to believe that Osama was not actually killed, but it would have been nice to have some outside confirmation done before the body was put beyond all reach.