Factcheck.org States The Obvious

The Birth Certificate is REAL.

In one of the silliest stories of this silly season, more than a few wingnuts have been ranting about Senator Barack Obama's "faked" birth certificate. So far local wingnuts Mike Pintek (here and here) and John Steigerwald and of course, Quinn and Rose (note the "hat tip" in that posting and if have you have the stomach for it, listen here) have further spread this story in one form or another.

In fairness, though, Steigerwald has NOT stated that he believes it himself. He was just saying that others have raised the issue. How "Bagdhad Bob" of him.

Pintek, though, made it onto the MediaMatters.org. Good for him! Nice to see him moving up in the world. Now everyone everywhere can know how much of a wingnut he is. Here's a flash: he also thinks that that whole "global warming" thing is a hoax. How surprising.

Anyway, Factcheck.org has the evidence to clearly show that Barack Obama was, in fact, born in the US. In Hawaii. In August of 1961. After Hawaii acheived statehood. That makes Obama a natural born citizen and therefore he meets that constitutionally mandated requirement for the Presidency.

Just like everyone said.

In another hit to his now defunct (as if he ever had any) credibility, smear-meister Jerome Corsi is on the record saying the certificate is "false" to Steve Doocy of Fox "News". Factcheck has a transcript:

Corsi: Well, what would be really helpful is if Senator Obama would release primary documents like his birth certificate. The campaign has a false, fake birth certificate posted on their website. How is anybody supposed to really piece together his life?

Doocy: What do you mean they have a "false birth certificate" on their Web site?
Corsi: The original birth certificate of Obama has never been released, and the campaign refuses to release it.

Doocy: Well, couldn't it just be a State of Hawaii-produced duplicate?

Corsi: No, it's a -- there's been good analysis of it on the Internet, and it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It's a fake document that's on the Web site right now, and the original birth certificate the campaign refuses to produce.

All of that, of course is bunk. Here's why. Factcheck.org actually got some first hand knowledge:

Recently FactCheck representatives got a chance to spend some time with the birth certificate, and we can attest to the fact that it is real and three-dimensional and resides at the Obama headquarters in Chicago.

They have a list of charges brought against the certificate:

• The birth certificate doesn't have a raised seal.
• It isn't signed.
• No creases from folding are evident in the scanned version.
• In the zoomed-in view, there's a strange halo around the letters.
• The certificate number is blacked out.
• The date bleeding through from the back seems to say "2007," but the document wasn't released until 2008.
• The document is a "certification of birth," not a "certificate of birth."

Then they go point-by-point to show how each criticism is, well, complete crap. They even have art. Here's the seal. See? It's raised and everything:


Here's the signature on the date of release:

Heck someone even found the contemporaneous newspaper announcement of the birth:

Of course the wingnuts are still not convinced (and we'd trust these people to drive?). One, and presumably more - as such political deleria is contagious, writes that the newspaper announcement could still be a faked, so proves nothing.

So let's see. IF the birth certificate is a fake, then the vast conspiracy to push this fakery onto an unenlightened public must be huge - and supremely efficient (only to be thwarted utterly by one guy with photoshop, of course). As politicfact has already noted, for this certificate to be faked the conspiracy has to reach deep into:

• The Hawaii Department of Health
• The Cook County (Ill.) Bureau of Vital Statistics
• The Illinois Secretary of State’s office
• The Attorney Registration & Disciplinary Commission of the Supreme Court of Illinois

Tin Hat, anyone?

I wonder if Mike Pintek will be issuing a correction.