Birthers force Obama to prove that he was in fact born in the United States

img-cs-obama-birth-certificate_091909119870I feel embarrassed for the United States today. I feel how educated folks must feel in countries where people, despite the evidence to the contrary, continue to burn women as witches, and hack the limbs from albinos because they’ve been told by holy men that doing so cures AIDS. I feel like we’ve now officially entered into the post-reality world. I can’t quite articulate it. Watching our democratically elected President hand over his birth certificate just makes me feel as though we’ve finally crossed over into some sort of fantasy world, where crazy conspiracy theories aren’t just tolerated and encouraged, but given real consideration, as though they were just as valid as real, evidence-based facts. It’s as though we’ve officially legitimized the racist fear-mongering that had been bubbling away below the surface these past few years, since we elected the nation’s first black President.

Here’s part of what the President had to say today.

…As many of you have been briefed, we provided additional information today about the site of my birth. Now, this issue has been going on for two, two and a half years now. I think it started during the campaign. And I have to say that over the last two and a half years I have watched with bemusement, I’ve been puzzled at the degree to which this thing just kept on going. We’ve had every official in Hawaii, Democrat and Republican, every news outlet that has investigated this, confirm that, yes, in fact, I was born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, in Kapiolani Hospital. We’ve posted the certification that is given by the state of Hawaii on the Internet for everybody to see. People have provided affidavits that they, in fact, have seen this birth certificate. And yet this thing just keepson going.

Now, normally I would not comment on something like this, because obviously there’s a lot of stuff swirling in the press on at any given day and I’ve got other things to do. But two weeks ago, when the Republican House had put forward a budget that will have huge consequences potentially to the country, and when I gave a speech about my budget and how I felt that we needed to invest in education and infrastructure and making sure that we had a strong safety net for our seniors even as we were closing the deficit, during that entire week the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we’re going to have to make as a nation. It was about my birth certificate. And that was true on most of the news outlets that were represented here…

How can you not feel sorry for this man?

It’s disgusting, and we should be ashamed.

And, to make matters worse, it’s not stopping. The Birthers are redoubling their efforts, raising new claims. The following comes from The Daily Beast:

…(T)he move did anything but end the chatter. Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck both said that they think the release today was timed to distract from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s news conference. Beck said, “My theory: This is because Bernanke is speaking today”…

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I’ve just spent a little time poking around a popular Republican website, and the theories are insane. Obama, in my opinion, should have known better. There’s no dissuading these people with facts.

“How come the 1 in 1961 on block 20 looks like it’s written in?,” says one commenter. Another asks, “Why is the O in Oahu floating like a balloon above the line, but not in OBAMA?”

“Wake up people,” says another Tea Partier, “This is all a distraction by Obama. He’s doing something bad now/soon and is using this so people will be distracted by this and not the real news, whatever that is.” Another says, “This might be believable if he had not spent over 2 years and millions to hide it. If he had produced something credible during the campaign when the issue first came up there would be few questions. This just heightens the suspicion that he was and still is hiding something. He didn’t produce squat, real or faked, until Trump made a public nuisance of himself.”

As for Trump, he’s selling this a major victory, claiming that Obama would never have revealed his real birth certificate if not for the media campaign waged by the suspiciously-coiffed reality television star. And, not one to leave the spotlight, Trump is now asking for the President’s education records, insinuating that something is amiss.

The right, in the face of being proven completely wrong, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is celebrating tonight. Another commenter on the Republican site referenced above says, “We’ve forced his hand. All the lies and deception Obama has fed us has now come to an end.”

Yes, by being shown to be racist assholes incapable of comprehending a veritable mountain of evidence to the contrary, they have won a decisive victory. That’s the upside down world we live in.

Now, if only people would get onboard with my campaign to have Trump’s mother and father exhumed so that tests can be performed proving that he is in fact their son, and not a Soviet plant. After all, there’s no way that we can be certain that the son born to the Trumps that day is in fact the same man we see before us today. What’s more, having never seen him eat or poop, we have no way of knowing that he in in fact human at all. He could very well be a real life version of Vicki the Robot from Small Wonder.

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33 Comments

  1. GD
    Posted April 27, 2011 at 10:14 pm | Permalink

    I don’t think it’s accurate to look at this as a racial issue. If Obama had been the son of a let’s say Russian man and a communist woman whose parents were communists and the son grew up to become a president who says he wants to fundamentally transform this nation and redistribute wealth and mocks people who “cling to their guns and god”, then some people who are philosophically and politically opposed to him would grab at any straw or conspiracy to try to get him out of office. It’s not the race; it’s the man and what he believes.

  2. Josh
    Posted April 27, 2011 at 10:19 pm | Permalink

    His addresses are becoming more and more blunt. None of the soaring rhetoric that passes over the heads of the ignorant people out there, but to the point. I think he probably got through to some people, don’t you?

  3. Josh
    Posted April 27, 2011 at 11:03 pm | Permalink

    Agreed, GD. You’re making the mistake, perhaps, of looking at it logically and factually, which is not what birthers are doing. I happen to know plenty of people (my grandparents, for instance) that treat this as a racial issue.

  4. Josh
    Posted April 27, 2011 at 11:03 pm | Permalink

    Agreed, GD. You’re making the mistake, perhaps, of looking at it logically and factually, which is not what birthers are doing. I happen to know plenty of people (my grandparents, for instance) that treat this as a racial issue.

  5. Boy O Boy
    Posted April 27, 2011 at 11:28 pm | Permalink

    I have zero doubt that ANY sitting president could produce “legitimate” birth certificates from all 50 states. But I don’t really care where he was born. Even IF he was born in barely a state Hawaii his “presidency” is the very incarnation of Constitutional violation. He was conceived as the illegitimate child of weak immigration policy, was raised on government welfare, and had his education funded through tax payer looting. No surprise he is perpetrating the fraud that created him. He is violation incarnate a big government Frankenstein choking us.

    Under the Constitution the founding father’s gave us, not only would he not have the right to be “president”, he wouldn’t even exist. Welcome to the United States of Hugo Chavez. I felt embarrassed for the United States the day he took oath in his circus.

  6. Boy O Boy
    Posted April 27, 2011 at 11:41 pm | Permalink

    You’re right GD. “Racism” is just what liberals cry when they don’t have anything to say. That’s why they cry it in every other breath. You never hear Republicans or people on the Real Right talk about racism. It’s liberals who are keeping the word alive so they can survive.

  7. Josh
    Posted April 27, 2011 at 11:55 pm | Permalink

    Boy O Boy, I think we can both agree that — legitimate or not — his birth is no longer important. What is important is the actual governing he does.

    I think that Republicans use his “illegitimacy” as a cry similar to the way you claim liberals do, which I think may be partially correct. What we should all be focusing on is the actual government. He’s there and he’s not leaving, so why is this conversation productive?

  8. Anonymatt
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 4:57 am | Permalink

    I never watched Small Wonder but I thought the robot had lifelike hair.

  9. Mr. X
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 5:10 am | Permalink

    I demand that we autopsy the doctor who signed this birth certificate, and everyone in the hospital’s administration at the time of this alleged birth.

  10. wetdolphinmissile
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 5:48 am | Permalink

    It is blatant racism…and then when proved wrong Trump asks “when he gets off the basketball court…”
    You don’t see it? You are part of the problem…

  11. Knox
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 6:04 am | Permalink

    There’s just no way that a black man could legitimately be our President. If his birth certificate wasn’t faked, and you can’t convince me that it wasn’t, then certainly there’s something else. I know it sounds far fetched, but I do believe that it’s possible that George Soros had him built in a lab, from the body parts of famous revolutionaries, terrorists and Democrats past, and trained by Bill Ayers under the watch of the Muslim Brotherhood in China.

  12. Knox
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 6:15 am | Permalink

    Here’s a great article on the suspicious elements surrounding his acceptance at Columbia and Harvard.

    http://dayriffer.com/category/28/l/2056/looks-like-trump-s-right-how-the-hell-em-did-em-this-president-get-into-those-ivy-league-schools

  13. EOS
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 6:19 am | Permalink

    A veritable mountain of evidence? All that was necessary was a single piece of paper. 2 1/2 years! Let’s move on to more substantial issues in this self-proclaimed “transparent administration” – stop endless war, reduce the debt, promote capitalism and full employment, and stabilize the economy.

  14. Brent
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 7:11 am | Permalink

    Remember the good old days at markmaynard, before the comments section turned into a conservative echo chamber? I miss logic and reason. But conspiracy and finger pointing is fun too, I guess.

  15. the doppelgang
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 8:04 am | Permalink

    Did anyone else notice that “Tater Salad” is commenting a lot less now that “Boy O Boy” is commenting? It’s almost like he’s shapeshifted.

  16. Bob
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 8:04 am | Permalink

    I hope to god Trump is the candidate. Both an easy reelection victory and nonstop hilarity. You are right about it being yet another international disgrace though. We look like idiots for the stuff we waste our time with, as a nation.

  17. Edward
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 8:40 am | Permalink

    The death toll from Obama’s birth certificate has risen to 173 across five states with Alabama and Mississippi each reporting increases in the number of deaths in their states.

  18. Meta
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 8:53 am | Permalink

    I liked this post:

    It was during my viewing of this video that I began to cry. I thought of my ancestors, both direct and collective, who had fought and died so that I might be treated as an American. I then thought of this fetid, smug, hate-filled, wealthy white man taking credit for the release and yet still not being satisfied. It does not matter how long we’ve been in these United States. We will never be American.

    http://www.baratunde.com/blog/2011/4/27/with-president-obamas-birth-certificate-klansman-trump-remin.html

  19. Sandy D.
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 10:40 am | Permalink

    How is Hawaii “barely a state”?

    Do the states that have been in the USA the longest get more rights than the ones that joined later? Or are the rights of the states based on the racial, economic or social status of their inhabitants?

  20. TaterSalad
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 2:03 pm | Permalink

    When you thought He had “coughed up the real birth certificate” we now know that it is a phony! If proven true through advanced technology, President Obama is on his way out of office and maybe prison.

    1. http://barnhardt.biz/index.cfm

    2. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/barack-obama/birth-obama-certer-movement-098513

    3. http://bryankeithnixon.com/?p=103

    4. http://www.biasedmediaboycott.com/index.php?topic=80.0

    5. http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf

    6. http://people.mags.net/tonchen/birthers.htm#ref04

    How the scam was commited by Obama and his aides:

    1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eOfYwYyS_c&feature=player_embedded

    2. http://beforeitsnews.com/story/595/413/I_need_help_of_photoshop_experts_to_provide_affidavits,_that_I_can_submit_to_court.html

    Could it be because of this.. ………………why Barack Obama released a fraudulent birth certificate at this time?

    http://tpartyus2010.ning.com/profiles/blog/show?id=3180617%3ABlogPost%3A75720&xgs=1&xg_source=msg_share_post

  21. John Galt
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 2:45 pm | Permalink

    Hawaii is barely a state because it’s like a boat. It just floats around. It’s part of America today, but it could be part of China tomorrow. Don’t tell me you’re one of those people who thinks that islands are somehow affixed to the planet.

  22. Boy O Boy
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 9:44 pm | Permalink

    “I never had sex with that woman.” “I am not a crook.” add a new one: “Here’s my birth certificate.”

    Hawaii had only been a “state” for two years before Obama was born. Many questioned then, and now, it’s legitimacy as state as it sat in the middle of the Pacific inhabited by more islanders than continentals. What’s next? Puerto Rico? Panama? Cuba? Venezuela?

  23. notoneofthecoolkids
    Posted April 28, 2011 at 10:05 pm | Permalink

    I happened to hear Mitch Albom on WJR today and he hilariously described how President Obama’s Umbilical cord had a message on it instructing how to fake his birth certificate. Listening to him reminded me that when I first heard about the bullshit birther theories it instantly reminded me of the original “Damon: the Omen” movies. Next they will want President Obama to shave his head.

  24. Mr. X
    Posted April 29, 2011 at 8:43 am | Permalink

    If you’ll recall, there was at one point a desire expressed by tea partiers to inspect the President’s penis. The thought was that they could tell his nation of origin by examining his foreskin.

  25. Meta
    Posted April 29, 2011 at 12:56 pm | Permalink

    From the Progress Report:

    The Death Of Birtherism
    During the 2008 campaign, in an effort to quell a nasty and unsubstantiated smear that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S., the Obama team took the unprecedented step of releasing the candidate’s certificate of live birth, only to realize they had inadvertently fanned the flames of the fledgling “birther” conspiracy movement. This Wednesday, the White House tried to put an end to questions about the President’s birthplace once and for all by releasing the long-form version of his birth certificate. “We do not have time for this kind of silliness,” Obama told reporters in a press conference after making the document public. The birther story has been revived in recent weeks by the inflammatory statements of TV personality and potential GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump. Although the myth that Obama was not born in the U.S. has been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked by leading news organizations, the White House has found the rumor stubbornly persistent. As the President put it, “this thing just keeps on going.” He has generally avoided speaking on the subject over the past two years, seemingly reluctant to escalate the malicious lies. But as the story has migrated from the extremist fringes to the mainstream media, and begun influencing the views of average Americans, the President clearly felt he could no longer afford to maintain his silence. Several Democratic allies have questioned the wisdom of wading into the fray — and the timing of the announcement — but White House officials apparently decided one month ago that the story had become damaging and distracting, and would continue to plague them through the 2012 campaign if they didn’t address it head on.

    HOW DID WE GET HERE: If the endurance of the birther myth teaches us anything, it’s the power of repetition. Any claim, no matter how outrageous, can take hold over time if it gets enough media exposure. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that nearly 25 percent of Americans, and 45 percent of Republicans, believed Mr. Obama was born in another country. The shocking fact that a quarter of all Americans now believe the lie — and an additional 18 percent say they don’t know where he was born — illustrates just how successful birther conspiracists have been at sowing doubt and attracting attention from mainstream news outlets. While the exact origins of birtherism are fuzzy, it has certainly been pursued most vigorously by the far right. Early proponents included California dentist Orly Taitz and the conservative website World Net Daily. They insisted that the birth certificate produced by Obama was a forgery, and Taitz even claimed — twice — to have a copy of t he “real” Kenyan birth certificate proving Obama was not American-born. A string of specious lawsuits claiming the president wasn’t qualified to hold office were all dismissed by the courts, and some of the filers, including Taitz, had to pay fines. However, by then mainstream figures, including then-CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, had begun weighing in and giving extremists the attention they so desperately sought, which allowed other networks and publications to “cover the coverage.” In fact, in his statement Obama gently admonished the media for being complicit in promoting birtherism. The story entered deeper into the political bloodstream when several GOP politicians realized it would be politically advantageous to play up the issue to their base. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal (R), Sen. David Vitter, (R- LA), and Alan Keyes all jumped on the bandwag on, while other Republicans, including Sarah Palin, simply flirted with birtherism by making leading statements like, “I think it’s a fair question” to investigate Obama’s birthplace. In March 2009, Rep. Bill Posey (R-FL) and 11 House co-sponsors introduced legislation requiring presidential candidates to provide a copy of their original birth certificate. More “birther bills” would soon follow. This year alone, bills have cropped up in more than a dozen legislatures to force presidential candidates to prove their citizenship. A few Republican leaders, however, recognized that embracing the t heory would be toxic for the party, and distanced themselves from the birthers. Erick Erickson, the editor of the popular RedState blog, publicly purged birthers from his site in 2010.

    THE AFTERMATH: On Wednesday Obama finally gave birthers what they said they always wanted: the long-form version of his birth certificate that has been kept on file in Hawaii. It surprised no one that, despite being presented with even more incontrovertible evidence that the President is an American citizen, many of them remained unconvinced. Birther crusader Pamela Geller declared on Fox that the newly-released document was “suspect,” while her Fox hosts appeared to nod in agreement. Texas state representative Leo Berman (R), the author of a birther bill, complained that the certificate didn’t look old enough, and Orly Taitz questioned its authenticity based on the fact that the race of Obama’s father is listed as “African,” not “Negro.” However, several prominent voices on the right admitted that the issue seemed to be resolved. Some, including Rush Limbaugh, engaged in revisionist history by suggesting they never had any doubts about the President’s origins and had been on his side all along. Other GOP leaders, confronted with the error of their past claims, tried to blame the whole affair on Obama himself, suggesting the controversy was his fault for not releasing his birth certificate earlier. “All I would say is, why did it take so long?” said potential GOP contender Newt Gingrich. He was not alone in ascribing sinister motives to the President’s timing: Sarah Palin tweeted to her followers, “don’t let the WH distract you w/ the birth crt,” and insinuated the President was simply trying to keep attention away from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s statement later that day. RNC Chairman Reince Priebus chastised the president for not focusing on more important issues. “Unfortunately his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our No. 1 priority–our economy.” In the wake of the document’s release, the dust seems to be settling exactly as you’d expect: some people have abandoned the cause while the die-hards fight on. But the President made it clear he wasn’t concerned about the fringe: “I know that there’s going to be a segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest,” he said. “But I’m speaking to the vast majority of the American people, as well as to the press.”

    WHY IT STICKS: It is no coincidence that MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow titled her segments on the birther story “Birther of a Nation,” an allusion to the D.W. Griffith film long thought to glorify the rise of the KKK. Doubts about the President’s origins have persisted because they speak to underlying concerns and suspicions about his background, ethnicity, and race. For some, the very presence of an African-American in the Oval Office is so offensive that they simply cannot accept his authority. The birther angle conveniently allows this segment of the population to wrap up their hatred in the flag — or more accurately, the Constitution. By suggesting Obama wasn’t born in America, what they are really claiming is that he is not even legally the President. The Constitution is regarded as something close to a sacred document in conservative cir cles, and in the birther world, Obama’s tenure itself is a violation of the founding document. The spread of the birther conspiracy into the mainstream reveals a disturbingly pervasive racial animus. This insidious fear that the America of old is being contaminated by foreign radicals isn’t only manifested in the birther debate. It can be seen in hysteria about “anchor babies,” Islamophobia, and Republican attempts to end birthright citizenship or prevent renewal of the Voting Rights Act. And while birtherism may always thrive only at the margins, this unsettling broader trend is firmly established. It turns out that electing a black president did not suddenly allow the country to “transcend” its checkered history with race. If anything, it has put lingering tensions front and center, and forced us to confront them.

  26. Peter Larson
    Posted April 29, 2011 at 6:35 pm | Permalink

    Who fucking cares. I also would like to know when marks site became fox news.

  27. Man O Man
    Posted April 29, 2011 at 9:13 pm | Permalink

    I sure wish I could find my own ass with both hands.

  28. Jason
    Posted April 30, 2011 at 10:34 am | Permalink

    Maybe some of the helpful birthers/teapartiers who frequent this site can help me with this bit of confusion. Presumably, most members of the birther movement voted for McCain (who was not born in the United States) in the 2008 election. What gives?

  29. Boy O Boy
    Posted April 30, 2011 at 11:05 pm | Permalink

    Jason read the law. He was born on a U.S. Naval Base which means U.S. soil. But I didn’t vote for him. I voted for something much bigger that he was carrying. Now that it’s given birth he is an empty egg shell.

  30. Jason
    Posted May 1, 2011 at 1:59 am | Permalink

    What do you mean by “the law?” As I understand it, the relevant law one is the reference to “natural-born citizen” in Article Two of the Constitution and there is no consensus on exactly what that means. Congress passed legislation specifically deeming McCain to be an eligible candidate although that resolution cites him being born on the naval base. The McCain campaign never publicly issued any sort of birth certificate, the 1937 law establishing citizenship for those born in the canal zone came after his birth in 1936 (suggesting he wasn’t born a citizen, and he claims to have been born in a hospital that wasn’t built until after he was born. I just find it rather interesting that the other candidate in the election has a much sketchier set of “natural-born citizen circumstances.” I’d be more impressed with an argument that the intent of the framers was that only white men who inherited land at birth would be considered eligible to be president than that “Hawaii is barely a state.”

  31. Posted May 1, 2011 at 12:28 pm | Permalink

    So — by the same criteria, is Alaska “barely a state”? Was Palin not really a governor? It’s very confusing.

    By the way, Reagan really did have no birth certificate, until the nice folks in Illinois whipped one up for him in 1942. I don’t remember that being an issue.

  32. Robert
    Posted March 6, 2012 at 5:40 pm | Permalink

    TaterSalad is correct that the birth certificate released by Obama’s people is a fake. TataerSalad however does not understand that the fake certificate was released intentionally to fan the flames of the whacko birther movement. It was why Trump pretended he was going to run for president also. This is part of the campaign strategy, to provoke the dumbest and craziest members of the GOP into taking the stage and alienating every moderate in the country with their lunacy.

    The document file released by Obama’s people was deliberately released as an editable file. Now that idiot Sheriff Arpaio out in Arizona it having press conferences about it and it’s being covered by television stations in Phoenix. It took them 6 months and 2,200 hours of examination to figure it out, even though it was obvious almost immediately to anybody who looked at the file.

    It’s similar to what Rove did to Dan Rather with the fake documents concerning Bush’s military service.

    People are such fucking suckers. These tactics will work every time. Moron’s never learn.

  33. Watching Laughing.
    Posted March 6, 2012 at 8:04 pm | Permalink

    This topic, NEXT,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

    WL.

2 Trackbacks

  1. By Now recruiting for Team Satan in Malawi on August 10, 2013 at 7:11 am

    […] to worry. He says people in Kenya love Americans… which I guess is understandable, given that our President was born there… And, even if that weren’t the case, I guess Pete’s always got Satan looking out […]

  2. By How to survive in a world without facts on December 1, 2016 at 11:36 pm

    […] Trump kind of took things to another level when he decided to become a national spokesperson for the so-called “birther” movement, but, really, it’s been with us for quite a while now. From the “swift boating” […]

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