Re: Jerome Corsi's New Book Proves Obama's Ineligible! ("This is going to make Watergate look like a political sideshow by comparison.")
Dear Birthers: Grasping at Straws Hurts the Conservative Cause.
Dear Birthers,
We, the rational conservatives of these United States, wish that you would shut up about the birth certificate of President Barack Obama. There is a “guilt by association” factor and the fact that your theories are looney, delusional and devoid of reality makes you no different than those who think the Apollo moon landings never occurred.
Please, we beg you, stop appearing as nuts to the average voter who knows the eligibility issue to be settled in both fact and in law.
Thank you.
The latest foray into the birth certificate nonsense comes from a familiar source – the nuts at World Net Daily who on June 7, 2011 proclaimed “
Expert: Obama doc is ‘proof’ – of fraud”
“My analysis proves beyond a doubt that it would be impossible for the different letters that appear in the Obama birth certificate to have been typed by one typewriter,” Irey told WND.
“Typewriters in 1961 could not change the size and shape of a letter on the fly like that,” he said. “This document is definitely a forgery.”
The “expert” is one Paul Irey, who worked as a typographer for over fifty years. Setting type was a specialized skills back in the 1960′s. However, it has nothing to do with the document at hand. Why? Because setting type does not give you expertise in current scanning methods, issues with OCR programs, paper types or typewriter ink absorption into paper.
Irey’s argument centers around this “analysis:”
Irey argues that because there are differences in the thickness of lines or strokes of letters, it is clear that the document was forged.
That argument exposes Irey’s ignorance, not his expertise.
First, it should be remembered that the injet and laser jet printers of today produce a fine, crisp letter in a word. Such was not always the case in 1961. In 1961, the crispness of a particular letter was determined by many factors. The biggest amongst these factors was the cleanliness of the keys striking the ribbon and the age of the ribbon itself. Older ribbons would not produce a clean letter because the saturation of the fabric ribbon was no longer a constant after being used several times. The metal ball or key that would strike the paper would get clogged with fine filaments of ribbon, causing the letter to not be a crisp and clean as possible. Every secretary of that era will tell you that any important document would be typed after cleaning the strikers and after replacing the ribbon. There is no reason to expect that this birth certificate was any different than the others being processed that day. There is no reason to think that clerk changed ribbons and cleaned the keys of their typewriter. Therefore, it is more than reasonable to assume that there would not be crispness in the letters.
Secondly, the paper on which the certificate was printed was an early form of a security paper. Such paper typically had wavy lines of gradient colors and different colored bits of thread in the paper. Such security measures were designed so that a fake birth certificate could not be made from normal, all white or all one color paper. Therefore, when a black and white scan of the colored paper is made, the copier will decide whether the colors of the background paper are white, black, or shades of gray. Those shades of gray add to the lack of crispness you see.
Furthermore, the copy of the birth certificate was scanned and placed in to a PDF file format using a optical character recognition (OCR) program. While such programs are modern day marvels, anyone who has ever used one will tell you that the program won’t recognize certain letters, certain words and will make the output document worse than the original.
That is what is happening with the letters Irey singles out. They are being pixelated and changed due to being run through a copy machine, and an OCR program. To think that some sort of 300 dpi scan is going to match clarity and quality of the original is ridiculous.
You don’t have to trust us on this. Try your own experiment. Take a book to the library and make a copy of it. Then take that copy and run it through an desktop scanner. Take the resulting image and blow that up using a graphics program. You’ll see the differences in letters that are not on the original. In fact, the OCR program will kick out words – entire words – that are not on the original page. And remember, you are doing this on an original that has a stark contrast between the white paper and black printed (not typed) letters.
We would bet that Irey did not do anything other than run the image through a low grade image processing program. That is how he came up with his “conclusions.” However, those conclusions are not based on reality or history.
As we were researching for this post, we came upon another issue that people say shows the birth certificate to be forged. “Kerning” is adjusting the distance between letters to give the document a more attractive and easily readable text. The eyes abhor a blank space in words, so modern word processing programs and graphic programs adjust for the space between letters.
People are using this from the document to show that the space between the letters has been adjusted and therefore the birth certificate must be a forgery:
See how the “a” and the “p” overlap? That is where the kern is. That spacing, people say, proves that the document is a fake as typewriters of the day did not have a feature that would allow the spacing between letters to be adjusted.
Not so fast.
First, look at where the evidence is taken from. It is close to the edge of the document. The lines of the document are distorted due to the document being larger than the copier used. It is clear there is distortion. That distortion, plus the above cited facts are more than enough to account for the kerning that is present. However, if you wish more proof that kerning was an issue with typewriters of that era, here is a copy of a letter written by General George S. Patton in 1943:
In the sixth paragraph, Patton mentions “Raymonde.” Here is a blow up of the area:
Notice how the spacing between the “R,” the “a”, the “y” and the “m” are all different. This is an example of what the people who point to the kerning in the birth certificate say is impossible. This difference in spacing comes from the typist literally “out typing” the machine. It was quite a common phenomenon. The typist would be pressing the keys faster than the mechanics of the typewriter could respond. Thus, you had letters being imprinted when the carriage had not yet completely moved to the next spacing. You will generally find this type of spacing issue on any letter from the period.
Lastly, is the issue of “natural born citizen.” This is a technical argument that needs to be discussed. The issue stems from Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution establishing the requirement to be eligible for the Presidency.
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
People have questioned “what is a natural born citizen?” If Obama’s father was Kenyan, how could Obama be a US Citizen?
First, it must be remembered that in 1961 Hawaii had been a state for two years. It was no longer a territory, but a state. There are some who have argued that the citizenship of a child flows from the body of the father, and indeed there is British common law that supports that view. However, Blackstone shows that the citizenship of the child is based on where the child is born. This is a tradition that we have carried forth since the inception of country. Yet this all becomes moot when one examines the US Code. Quoting USC 8-12 1405:
A person born in Hawaii on or after August 12, 1898, and before April 30, 1900, is declared to be a citizen of the United States as of April 30, 1900. A person born in Hawaii on or after April 30, 1900, is a citizen of the United States at birth. A person who was a citizen of the Republic of Hawaii on August 12, 1898, is declared to be a citizen of the United States as of April 30, 1900.
This statute was passed long before Obama was born and clarifies what the intent of the government is and was when examining citizenship.
(If one does not accept the idea that American citizenship is dependent upon the location of birth, why is there a movement, led by Conservatives, to outlaw the practice of “anchor babies?” These are children that are born in the US and are recognized as US citizens even though neither parent is an American citizen. If the place of birth was not the controlling factor in citizenship, then there is no need to pursue a course that would outlaw US citizenship for “anchor babies” as the citizenship would not be an issue.)
There is no legal doubt that Obama is a citizen of the United States and is eligible to be President. Those who cling to the notion that the birth certificate is faked, or that because his father was not a US citizen he cannot be a citizen are falling right into the trap the Democrats and liberals want.
They want us talking about an issue that, to the vast majority of America, is settled.
It is clear that in the next election, the battle is going to be for the middle. That is the way it often is. The far left and radical liberals will vote for the Democratic nominee. The far right and conservative Republicans will vote for the Republican nominee. That is a given. The votes that are up for grabs are the middle of the road voters – the voters who are not ideologically bound to a party or political spectrum.
When conservatives start to talk about issues that the average, normal, everyday middle of the road voter feels is settled, we come off as being out of the mainstream and as weird as Holocaust deniers.
That is dangerous to the long term success of the conservative movement.
It is amazing how people will get locked into a position and will deny it no matter what facts are presented. Holocaust deniers are that way. Despite millions of people being missing, despite the records, despite the visual witnesses of American fighting men, deniers will continue to be driven by something other than facts. “Truthers” are the same way. They will contend that no planes flew into the World Trade Centers or into the Pentagon. Despite what we all saw with our own eyes, truthers will continue to say that the attacks on America on 9/11 were the work of the government. In doing so, they agree with many Muslim tyrants who have blamed the US government or “the Jews” for the attacks.
It is time to let the “birther” meme go. It is time to let the issue die as far as Barak Obama is concerned. While we here at Raised on Hoecakes would love to see a law or statute clarifying what documentation is needed prove eligibility to be president, we are pragmatic enough to know that such legislation will be seen as an attack on this president rather than a guide for future elections.
There are plenty of things to hit Obama with: energy, taxes, the economy, regulations, lack of jobs and his foreign policy are just a few.
The “birther” issue has to be put aside as it does not, and will not resonate with the people in the middle. It makes conservatives look “looney by association.”
If people really want to get Obama out of the White House, they will stick with issues and ideas that mean something to the majority of the people in the country. For them – the voters we are trying to reach – the issue of Obama’s eligibility to be President is settled.
Let the issue die and let’s focus on what will result in Obama being a one term president.
Dr. Conspiracy ™
