Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Kenyan Birth Certificate

Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see. ~ Ben Franklin (although I first encountered this wisdom in a 1950's Disney comic book)
The Birthers obsession with an alleged Obama birth certificate from Kenya is just hilarious. In this era of Photoshop, computer graphics, and high-end printers, forging a forty year-old government document is child's play. Sadly, No! shows how easy it is to prove that George W. Bush as actually born in England.

Aging a document is trickier, although coffee, an oven, and patience will do a nice job. A well schooled forger can create a document that will keep experts guessing. The authenticity of the Maybrick Diary, that alleges to be the diary of Jack the Ripper, has been debated for years.

As forgeries go, this is a poor one. It can be proven a forgery six ways from Sunday, although for me there is one outstanding point of illogic that proves it a fake. Barack Obama Sr. was a Kenyan from the region of Victoria Lake of the Luo ethnicity. Why would he choose to take his wife to Mombasa, in Zanzibar in 1961, for the birth of his child? It makes no sense, Nairobi was actually in Kenya and close to his family. And since Obama Sr. was a student in Hawaii at the time, and had left another wife back in Kenya, wouldn't it have been smarter to have stayed put in the Aloha State?

So, why do these fakes keep popping up? There is money in it. Quick and easy money.

Native and Natural Born Citizenship has done the best research into this circus. If you want to see what batshit insane looks like, here is Birther Orly Taitz on MSNBC.
Update: Proof that John McCain is a Kenyan, too.

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