Tag: birthers

It has been a rough week for the Birthers.  After 2 and 1/2 years of demands that President Barack Obama release his long-form birth certificate to prove that he is, in fact, an American citizen qualified to serve as Commander-in-Chief – he did just that.  He released it.

Presented with the document for which they had been asking, they have now begun to do what any good conspiracy theorists would do – reject its legitimacy.  Because as we are all aware, America loves a conspiracy.  And conspiracies never really die, they evolve.

Here is a culling of many of the new problems that the Birthers have with the long-form birth certificate.  For all specifics, please refer to the (completely unaltered) copy of the document below.

• Let’s start at the top.  What the hell is a “certificate of live birth?”  That’s what the old short-form one said.  Can this man not just provide a “birth certificate?”  Not the same thing.  Seriously.
• If you look at the left side, it is obviously copied from a bound book.  The background outside the book parameters matches up too seamlessly with the book page pattern.  Shopped.
• It’s missing everything that a birth certificate should have – the birth weight, a cute little baby-footprint and an official seal.  What gives?
• Obama was “born” on August 4th, 1961.  The date the certificate was accepted is August 8th, 1961.  What’s the hold-up, guys? Hiding something?
• There are two small, very faint Xs above the twin and triplet boxes at the top.  Does Obama have identical siblings.  Are they all Obama? Are all 3 of them running the country?  Is it like Multiplicity?
• In the “Father’s Race” box, it says “African.”  If this was really written in 1961, the race would say “Colored” or “Negro.”  And while we are on the subject of races, the type for the mother’s race “Caucasian” is way too perfect.  No typewriter in 1961 could type so perfectly.
• Under hour of birth, the “M” in “P.M” is a different font.  Might as well be in Comic Sans.
• The box next to the name of the attendant is all smudged and stuff.
• There has to be something to the barely visible vertical numbers on the right side of the certificate.  Looks like something 991.
• The doc who signed the certificate died 8 years ago.  Oh, how convenient.  Looks like we’ll never get him to talk.

Ok, that was fun.  But the conspiracy sub-conspiracy that is beginning to gain to most traction on the interwebs is the so called “layers” conspiracy.  Apparently, if you open up the birth certificate in Photoshop or something similar, you can see and are able to manipulate multiple layers.  This obviously means that someone shopped the certificate and screwed up the part of forgery where you make it not look like a forgery.  Videos have hit YouTube as demonstration of the “layers” conspiracy.  Check it out:

As Gawker points out, it truly is best left to a YouTube commenter to explain this phenomenon:

It’s called OCR (optical character recognition). Acrobat and many scanners do this by default. It detects letters and words on the page and allows you to add selectable text to the document without having to type it in manually.

Notice how when you hide a layer, it’s white behind it? If it was truly forged, you wouldn’t see any of the background missing. It’s white because it doesn’t know what’s behind the text BECAUSE THE TEXT WAS THERE WHEN IT WAS SCANNED.

Beliefs on Barack Obama’s political stances and policies aside, you have to be amazed by the persistence of this group.  Their ability to keep finding points of contention even when presented with the very evidence they demanded is staggering.  Who said Americans never work hard at anything?

Thanks to Buzzfeed, Gawker and Smoking Gun.