Surprise! Ten days after President Obama released his long-form birth certificate, WorldNetDaily founder Joseph Farah declared last night that his crackpot website will “be presenting what I believe is compelling new evidence that Obama is not only ineligible to be president, but that the document released by the White House is fraudulent.” Oh, good. This should prove to be a scholarly exercise.

WND literally cannot accept that Obama was definitively born in the U.S. and is eligible to be president for a simple reason: money. They've built much of their Obama-era business model around questioning Obama's birth certificate and eligibility. (You can still prove to your neighbors you are incapable of critical thinking with your very own “Where's the Birth Certificate?” lawn sign, t-shirt, or bumper sticker.)

Jerome Corsi's WND-published new book, Where's the Birth Certificate?, is set for release next week. Obama releasing his long-form a few short weeks before the book's release put WND in a somewhat awkward position, but they are undeterred. In an attempt to make the release of this book less outwardly hilarious -- and in lieu of adding the subtitle "Oh, There It Is" -- the crew at WND is going all in and declaring that Obama's long-form is a forgery.

Farah's latest column, headlined “The birth certificate debate -- it's not over,” essentially gives the Cliff's Notes version of Corsi's two latest stories. Farah concludes that the supposed birther cover-up “could make Watergate pale by comparison.”

According to Farah, the pencil marks on Obama's long-form birth certificate are “the very same tell-tale scribblings found in a clearly fraudulent document posted on the Internet about a year ago -- a document that alleged he was born in Kenya.” This proves... something? Even Farah's not entirely sure, but he is asking for “some viable explanation other than the two documents were created by the same forger.” That must be it, Joseph.

It would be tedious and probably pointless to assess their latest “evidence” in detail, but just to get an idea of how far past the bottom of the barrel the birthers have now scraped, here's a small sample:

The text on the images comes from the source where Corsi originally got them, which he identifies as “an analysis posted on Facebook by GoodTryBarry."

“GoodTryBarry” writes that we should “notice how the childish scribble covered up the double Xs.” However, it's difficult for me to “notice” that, because there quite obviously are no “double Xs” on Obama's birth certificate to be “covered up.” Also, and probably more importantly, if the White House was going to contract someone to forge a birth certificate, I'm guessing they'd probably hire someone whose skills at image manipulation have progressed beyond “childish scribbles.”

In a separate article posted by Corsi, a “private investigator claims employees of the state Department of Health forged three Hawaiian birth certificates for Barack Obama to 'screw the birthers.'”

Who is this private investigator? [emphasis added]:

The 57-year-old detective, who has been a P.I. since the 1980s, said he was stunned when he discovered that the purported copy of Obama's original birth certificate released by the White House was more or less an exact image of one of the forgeries.

Irei said he was provided a copy of the document indicating a Queens birthplace but ascribed no importance to it. He explained that he was focused on finding evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, which he thought would provide a financial windfall.

[...]

Irei explained the state employee told him the fake records were kept in a vault in Room 303 of the Hawaii Department of Health. The room, next to the director's office, is well known and holds files such as the records of residents of the Kalaupapa leper colony on the island of Molokai.

Not entirely unlike the website forwarding his claims, this private investigator sees big money in the birther issue.

WND's goal in publishing pieces like this is to continue muddy the waters of the birther “debate,” coherence and logic be damned. If they are successful, WND can keep a chunk of the American public uninformed enough to keep filling their wallet.

I'm looking forward to all of this blowing over so we can read Corsi's next book, Why We'll Never Catch Bin Laden.