WND's attempts to discredit Obama's long form birth certificate -- in the desperate hope that it will make Jerome Corsi's upcoming book, Where's the Birth Certificate?, somehow relevant -- have crossed the line from pathetic to hilarious.
Earlier this week, WND CEO Joseph Farah announced that he is persuaded that “the birth certificate released by Barack Obama's White House is fake, phony, a fraudulent forgery.” Yesterday, he wrote: “It's about to get much worse for Obama. We are just days away from several more shoes dropping.” He added that “we may be witnessing the final days of the Barack Obama regime.”
If the most recent report by Corsi is any indication, Obama probably doesn't need to pack up his desk any time soon.
Last night, Corsi published an article about how the supposed “growing list of apparent anomalies” in Obama's long-form certificate “continues to fuel suspicion that the document is a crude, computer-generated forgery.”
The latest “anomaly” is a supposed “typographical error” used in the Hawaii Department of Health stamp on Obama's long-form. Take us away, Jerome [note: some of WND's images have been resized to fit Media Matters' site -- originals here]:
The stamp, affixed April 25, 2011, says “TXE RECORD.”
Yet, on a copy of a Hawaii long-form birth certificate issued only one month earlier, the stamp says “THE RECORD.”
The stamp on the Obama document reads: “I CERTIFY THIS IS A TRUE COPY OR ABSTRACT OF TXE RECORD ON FILE IN THE HAWAII STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH.”"
Here is registrar Alvin T. Onaka's stamp on the White House document:
Here is a close-up of the state registrar's stamp on the White House-issued Obama long-form birth certificate:
The state registrar's stamp on a copy of a long-form birth certificate released by the Hawaii Department of Health just one month earlier, March 15, 2011, clearly is different, reading “THE RECORD.”
Here is a close-up of the stamp on the March 15, 2011, birth certificate copy:
Why would the Hawaii DOH allow the document to be issued to President Obama with a registrar's stamp containing the obvious misspelling?
I'll allow you a moment to recover from hitting your face on your keyboard. Done? Good.
Corsi and his fellow birther diehard supersleuths operate according to an inverse Occam's Razor, where the most obvious explanation for something is never the correct one. While Corsi mentions what any vaguely rational person would view as the clear explanation for this “typographical error” -- namely, that “the stamp was distorted by using too much ink or pressing too hard” -- he immediately discards it.
What, exactly, is Corsi alleging here? That the Obama team went through the trouble to create a fake long-form certificate, but didn't bother spellchecking the fake state registrar stamp? (Also, it's not entirely clear why they would have needed to forge the stamp in the first place, since the Hawaii State Department of Health is on record affirming that Obama was born there.)
Does Corsi think the person who was forced at gunpoint to make the fake birth certificate decided to sneak in a secret message for people like Corsi to find later? “X marks the spot! And if you cut an X in half, it kind of looks like a K, which is the first letter of Kenya!” Or maybe it was a secret clue to the identity of Obama's true father...
This is all embarrassing and comical, but it's worth noting that birtherism was always this absurd. When Fox News and conservative media figures went all-in promoting the ridiculous conspiracy last month, these are the types of people they were mainstreaming.