Sunday, August 24, 2008

Victory!

I have been keeping up my attack on that crazed right-wing nutjob blog I found a few weeks ago. On Friday, I had a major victory. I got her to admit that there really isn't anything to the whole "Obama can't produce a legit birth certificate" nonsense.

Have you all heard about this? Because I hadn't realized it was a thing. But apparently the right-wing blogosphere has been ablaze with this insistence that something is amiss with Obama because he couldn't produce a "legitimate" birth certificate. My blog frenemy chastised me for not being educated about my candidate, but I don't think I should have to be aware of all the crazy conspiracy theories those kooky bloggers can come up with. (Seriously, where do they come up with this stuff?) So upon her urging, I googled "Obama birth certificate." She should have taken her own advice because the first four links were to legit news agency reports debunking the entire thing.

Apparently, the birth certificate that Obama's people had been scanning to e-mail and faxing did not show an embossed seal, so something was clearly fishy. Except that Hawaii, for whatever reason, puts the embossed seal on the back side, so it wouldn't show up on a faxed or scanned copy. A couple of quick calls to Hawaii and checks against original birth certificates from others born in Hawaii verified this was the case.

So I pointed this all out to my frenemy, along with the point that since he had acquired a driver's license, a marriage license, a law license, a passport, and was a sitting US Senator, at least the state of Illinois and the federal government were satisfied by his documentation, so perhaps she should be, too. She then took another look at the online image of the birth certificate and conceded that I was probably right. She even acknowledged that you can kind of see where the seal would be on the back side. Score one for reason!

But there are undoubtedly still others out there who will go to their graves swearing there is something terribly wrong with Obama's birth certificate. And that it matters tremendously. They won't be able to identify exactly why it matters. And they won't ever think about the sheer ludicrousness of the idea that a sitting senator and candidate for president forged a birth certificate without any state of federal agency ever figuring it out. But at least one of them has put down the kool-aid. On that one issue. I'm still working on the "born and raised Mulsim" thing and the "143 days of experience" thing.

We really need to institute a voting test. Anyone who espouses as truth one of these crazy blogosphere conspiracies does not get to vote!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, small victories. But once someone realizes that something they've been told is a sack of dirt, then maybe they'll start to realize that everything else they hear from the same source is a sack of dirt.

S said...

I'm hoping so! I still can't quite believe I got her to admit that. Usually when confronted with a rational counter-argument, she just ignores it and moves on to a new attack.

Did you ever go read that blog?

Anonymous said...

Yes, and it's a hoot.

At my company, we have a guy who's been forwarding the right-wing "scare stories" to everyone on his e-mail list, including me. I've sent him (and just him) back snopes.com articles debunking every one that he's sent. Today, he forwarded the "Obama is not a natural-born citizen" story just to me, and asked me to debunk it, which I did. I guess he doesn't want to keep exposing his ignorance to the rest of the company.

A Voice of Sanity said...

John McCain wasn't born in any one of the 50 US states!
Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.

 
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