The President's Birth Certificate

(Please take the time to check out the URLs I mention in this posting.  Don't just take my word for it.  I also recommend that you do a Google search using the words Obama Birth Certificate and read some of the material to which your search will lead you.)

Before getting too far into the question of the President’s birth certificate, please look off to the right where the “Blog Archives” are listed and click on “February” and then on the posting entitled “Truth - Whatever you want it to be.”  That posting, written at the time of President’s Day, 2011, points out that totally false information can be massaged and twisted until it actually has a degree of credibility sufficient to make a gullible person believe it to be true.  The “fact” in question that I was writing about at that time was whether or not Alexander Hamilton was once President of the United States.  Please read it.

So it is with the question of whether or not Barack Obama was actually born in the United States.  If he were not, his presidency is illegitimate.  Some on the far right bring up the question of why the President’s actual birth certificate has never been produced and also question a lot of other things about his background that they feel have not been adequately documented.  Between the lines, it comes through that these folks believe that the President is a “ringer” who was not born in the United States, did not go to the schools he purports to have attended and actually is some sort of “Manchurian Candidate” foisted off on the nation by some sinister forces.  Most of their arguments are as specious as those who believe that Alexander Hamilton was once President.  They produce no evidence whatsoever, but hang their hat on the failure of the President to provide the additional evidence they are asking for.  This kind of thing is all over the internet.  It started at the time the President was elected in 2008 and continues today.   

A good place to start looking for it is at the World Net Daily web site (www.wnd.com) which is filled with anti-Obama material, mostly in a sub-section entitled "ObamaWatchCentral." The stories on this site remind me of the magazines on sale at supermarket check-out counters.  A site which attempts to address the issue more factually is www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html.   

From the reading I have done on the internet, my feeling is that the Certification of Live Birth (reproduced the other day on this blog) issued by the State of Hawaii indeed documents the fact that an actual Birth Certificate filled out in 1961 is on file somewhere in the State’s archives.  It may be a piece of crumbling paper or more likely on a roll of microfilm, but there is no reason to believe that it doesn’t exist.  Some critics of the President would have you believe he actually was born in Kenya and subsequently set up “phony” records in Hawaii years later. (I have seen a fraudulent  Kenyan birth certificate documenting the President’s birth there which a search on www.snopes.com  deems as false. Use the words “Obama Kenyan Birth Certificate” when you do your search on snopes.com.)  They make similar inferences about his academic credentials.  Also, if he was not born in Hawaii, the birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser cannot be explained unless that newspaper’s archives were also subsequently altered.   Apparently, a significant number of Americans are willing to accept these arguments.  Others, such as Donald Trump, are satisfied merely to seek right wing support by continuing to ask the President for further documentation.

It is my feeling that the President is not hiding anything.  What he is unwilling to do is deal with accusers who come from the very bottom of the journalistic and political barrels and prefer to believe what they want to believe despite evidence to the contrary.  Giving in to their requests for further information about his birth, and academic history for that matter, would lower the President to their level and provide them with unwarranted credibility.  There are legitimate Republicans who do not buy into the questioning of the President’s place of birth and are embarrassed by the demands of those who doubt his legitimacy.  It is my opinion that this latter group will destroy the Republican Party as we know it. If the State of Hawaii is willing to go on the line, and through their Certification of Live Birth form, certify that Barack Obama was born there, and that is adequate to get a passport or drivers license, it is good enough for me.    

Jack Lippman


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