Obama Birth Certificate Issue Causing Needless Distractions
Tuesday, August 4, 2009 5:59 PM
By: Pamela Geller Article Font Size
On Aug. 2 there came to light a birth certificate showing that Barack Obama was born in Coast General Hospital in Mombasa, Kenya in 1961. It was published far and wide, but was quickly shown to be a forgery: It says it was issued by the Republic of Kenya on Feb. 17, 1964, before there was a Republic of Kenya, and when Kenya was still a British Dominion.
Who would have an interest in publishing such an obvious forgery at this time? How did the Obama birth certificate question, so widely ridiculed by both the left and the right, become a national issue?
First, a little history. It all started very innocently. Well over a year ago, rumors began to swirl about Obama’s country of origin. In response, left wing operatives over at the Daily Kos posted a Certification of Live Birth (COLB). Almost immediately, even to the layman’s eye, it was obvious that the Kos COLB had been altered.
When a brouhaha ensued in the blogosphere, the blogger, Jay McKinnon, owned up. The Israel Insider site said on July 3, 2008 that McKinnon “implicated himself in the production of palpably fake Hawaii birth certificate images similar to the one endorsed as genuine by the Barack Obama campaign, and appearing on the same Daily Kos blog entry where the supposedly authentic document appears.”
Israel Insider noted that Kos’s COLB post was a “response to a request by Jim Geraghty of the National Review Online, who had, three days before, called for the Obama campaign to release the candidate’s birth certificate.” On June 9, 2008, Geraghty had said that the Obama campaign could debunk a number of rumors simply by releasing a copy of Obama’s birth certificate, noting that “reporters have asked for it and been denied, and the state of Hawaii does not make such records public.”
Kos accordingly posted his, saying simply that he had “asked the campaign” for it. Israel Insider asked the key question: “Why would a presidential campaign that has its own ‘Fight the Smears’ website rely on a radical left-wing blog like Daily Kos to post its official documents, especially one as sensitive and controversial as a birth certificate?”
And all this was going on while McKinnon was admitting that he had produced a false birth document.
At the same time, wanting to refute what was now going viral, Obama ran a low-resolution COLB on his own site FighttheSmears.com, which has now been taken down and the archives scrubbed. It was at that time that a digital forensic examination specialist contacted me. For professional and personal reasons he wanted to remain anonymous, but I know who he is and vetted him. “Techdude’s” credentials? He is an active member of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the American College of Forensic Examiners, the International Society of Forensic Computer Examiners, the International Information Systems Forensics Association — the list goes on.
He is also board certified as a forensic computer examiner, a certificated legal investigator, and a licensed private investigator. He has been performing computer based forensic investigations since 1993 (although back then it did not even have a formal name yet) and he has performed countless investigations since then. He told me that Obama’s COLB was a “horrible forgery.” I advised “Techdude” that I was ill-equipped to make such a determination, and he offered to submit to me a detailed forensic examination analysis — which he ultimately did.
When I broke the story and presented his very extensive and meticulously documented analysis, we welcomed peer review. Nobody stood up. Nobody would touch it. To their credit, the supporters of Hillary Clinton (the “PUMA” bloggers) did much to investigate and advance the story. And while the Obama Chicago attack machine and left-wing smear merchants went into full swing, the mainstream activist media would not touch the story. Not once.
I never proposed that any of the various scenarios being put forth were absolutely correct. I said at the time, “Do I believe Obama was born in Hawaii? Probably. Is there something on Obama's birth certificate he does not want us to see? Foe shizzle. Should a president of the United States have to present his vault copy to take office? Absolutely.”
I said that forensically, the COLB Obama had presented was an altered document. And I stand by that to this day. A release of the vault copy would have put this baby to bed a year ago. Instead, Obama and his operatives added fuel to the fire by not only not releasing the vault copy, but by spending upwards of a million dollars on five law firms to fight its release.
Here we are a year later, and this issue is on fire. Why? Perhaps because the American people, in their sudden desperation at having made a shotgun wedding, are looking for an annulment. And just as you couldn’t get Al Capone on his heinous crimes of murder and racketeering, but got him on tax evasion, so they hope they can get Obama on this technicality regarding eligibility. Obama’s refusal to release the vault copy has only increased interest, with the speculation now creating a veritable birth certificate circus.
There might be something more sinister at work here, both specifically in the release of the spurious Kenya birth certificate and generally in the persistence of this issue. Perhaps all the documentation on Obama’s birth certificate and citizenship is in order. There is no way of knowing. I suspect that the administration has a hot little document that will wash away Obama’s sins and make the concern about this issue look silly.
And that may be just the point. In this entire affair, the left has consistently been playing by Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” Rule 5 states: “ ‘Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.’ There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.”
In what could be considered a psyop on the American people, the birth certificate issue is being used to smear the Republicans in general as “birthers,” conspiracy nuts who have given themselves over to right-wing nuttery. Any mention of this issue inspires in many the same revulsion as being diagnosed with the clap did in the ‘50s. And the arrogance and fear on the right of being tainted by this issue has created such dissension and infighting that we’re eating our young — and the left is positively giddy.
We, the American people, are not the enemy here, we are not the guilty party. The media should stop blaming the victim. Remember: conservatives are not responsible for the birth certificate issue at all. Obama is, by refusing to this day to release the vault copy — whether because it contains something damaging or simply because it enables him to wield the weapon of ridicule against the right. At this point, the effect is the same regardless of which of those possibilities is true. This carnival of conspiracy has become a deliberate distraction from the real issues and the real destruction being wrought by the Obama administration.
The longer the Obama camp lets this issue fester and grow, the more it divides the country. And at the end of the day, anyone who questioned the birth certificate is going to look nuts, and any subsequent challenge from the right on any legitimate issue will be dismissed as a recrudescence of “birtherism,” and more of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
What trickery! What a nasty game to play on the electorate that put him in office. Are the American people so contemptible as to be deserving of such treatment? Has the focus on the birth certificate taken our eye off the ball on questions pertaining to the source of his funding for Harvard (i.e., foreign aid, foreign student loan applications) and the passport on which he traveled to Pakistan in 1981? Let’s just say hypothetically that Obama satisfied the birth certificate questions and the American people wanted info on his Pakistan trip — i.e., what passport he traveled, on or the source of funding for his Harvard education, his ties to Khalid al-Mansour, etc. Those raising such concerns would have no case. They would be discredited before they even started.
Let’s not cloud the issue. Obama’s COLB was altered. He should produce the vault copy. Then the opposition can get on with the business of stopping his destruction of the economy and his weakening of American hegemony as he pursues his disastrous foreign policy.
Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs Web site and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. Her Op-Eds have appeared in the Washington Times, Newsmax, Human Events, WorldNetDaily, the American Thinker, Israel National News, and other publications.
