Birther Balloon Pops? Don't Count On It!



This is MY conversion of the PDF file
into JPG format. Click to embiggen.
(I hope it spawns whole new theories!)

 "Why doesn't he just release his birth certificate? If he did that, all of these questions would just go away." This refrain has echoed through the internets for the last two to three years, as a germ of a conspiracy theory took root. No doubt--no doubt--fueled by racism, the theory gathered more and more outlandish embellishments, all of which have been debunked (go here to see, if you don't believe me).


It was difficult getting through my work day knowing--after President Barack Obama released his "long form" birth certificate--that right-wing world was wobbling on its axis. I knew as sure as I draw breath that the release of the long form would not put an end to the issue. On the contrary, it has lit the conspiracy set on fire. They were of course convinced that it was a fraud. Immediately after the announcement, they were already saying "what took so long?" and, "he's had three years to whip up a forgery." And once they had a few minutes and hours to check out the actual document at Whitehouse.gov, they nitpicked and speculated like a 9/11 truther happening upon some new crumb of "evidence."

I'm a graphic artist, so I have a lot of hands-on experience with graphics files. So some of the speculation I see as mere ignorance, fueled by a desire to cling to the conspiracy theory. Some of it is flat-out stupidity being sold with unwarranted confidence. All of it is wrong. I can't prove that the document released today is the genuine article, but most likely, it is. The birther contention that Stanley Ann Dunham Obama travelled to Kenya late in her pregnancy--with no evidence--and then back again is ludicrous on its face when you factor in the logistics of the trip in 1961. The newly released document confirms known information (such as the hospital's name), provides a little new information (such as the doctor's name), and does nothing to further the birther cause. Unless you're a birther. To wit. . .

"Why were the signatures made so long after the printed date of birth?"

Editor: Because paperwork piles up in hospitals? My birth certificate is signed a few days late as well.

[There was a white copy of the BC released as well as the green one above] "The white one does not show the white marks around the lettering. They should have just released the non-green one as it does not show the forgery."

Ed.: Duh. White marks on white paper?

"Obama’s people have had over 3 years to FORGE 336 characters/certificate marks. Even for a D student you can do a bang up job if you have available a free 3 days per letter to work on forging a document. It needs to be scrutinized and verified. "

Ed.: You can tell he is serious, because he did the math!

"The letter “K” in box #16 doesn’t match the rest of them. Why no mailing address for the mother?"

Ed.: There was an old-timey machine called a "typewriter," and it sometimes typed out of line. Dummy. And the mailing address is missing because she didn't fill it in, obviously.

"[D]ocuments can be falsified...and I expect that the power of the POTUS has the available resources to make a damn good forgery."

Ed.: Well you've got us there. This one is unfalsifiable. Obviously, this guy would accept nothing as proof.

"Okay ... what’s up with the odd page curl and the fact that this document was placed on that green background?"

Ed.: Zero deductive reasoning skills here. The page is rolled because it is scanned/copied from a bound book. The paper is not distorted because the paper is new. It was a newly ordered copy. Duh.

"FAAAAAAKKKKKKKEEEEEE !!!!! Grab the PDF off the Drudge Report Zoom in to 300%. All the typing is surrounded by white space. All of the typing has white inside the letters. This is cut and paste. Do they really think we are that stupid."

Ed.: Yes, we think you're that stupid.

"This is at 600% In my limited experience with photoshop, that sure looks like a lot of dithering around the signatures (note none on the typed part in upper left corner)--IME that is a dead giveaway that somehow the image has been manipulated..."

Ed.: All along, the birthers have pointed to flaws in documents and pictures found on the internet as though they are high-resolution originals. They are not. They are digital scans, and manageable internet-ready resolutions. Compression (especially in JPEG files) causes pixelizations, distortions and other artifacts. "Limited experience with PhotoShop" is right.

"You're right. African is a nationality and not a race. Hawaii was a state then and the descriptor used would be "negro"."

Ed.: Possibly the dumbest contention of the lot. If BO Sr. put "African" for his race, then that is what he PUT. No mystery there.

"Rush mentioned that if you put the .pdf file in Adobe Illustrator, it would show multiple layers. I did; it does. That means they added the elements that show in the blue bounding boxes THEN FORGOT TO flatten the image." 

Ed.: This one sounds really good, unless you are familiar with the software involved. In some software, when you scan in a document, isolated bits of the image can be saved as separate elements. They are in effect "clipping masked" into their own graphic image. If you take the file into a program like Adobe Illustrator, you can separate out all of the individual objects. The fact that the elements here are so random (such as an "R" being on a different layer from the rest of the president's name) lends credence to this idea. It does not prove forgery. Even the element that is left behind--the green background with white voids where all of the copy was--lends credence. It also explains the white halos around the text when you zoom in. This is proof of nothing, except that they probably should have scanned it to a high-resolution, non-lossy TIFF file. But would that have stopped them from finding something?

"Also, the Certs are only one day apart, yet they show a completely different signature as Registrar, and obama's shows no signature for a Director of Health."

Ed.: Yes, because there is only one Registrar in all of Oahu.

Find much more here: Free Republic or Free Republic (and there are many, many, many more threads on the subject).


Of course, this is all academic. The real issue isn't the birth certificate, and never was. It was something on which to hang their dissatisfaction with the current resident of the White House. Feel free to speculate about what their real reason for that is, I've already given you mine. But the fact that they're picking these results apart and/or saying he's not legitimate regardless shows that the release of this document was pointless (to crazy people). It will settle the matter, one hopes, for the more sane among us.