Well duh.
In this interview, Jerome Corsi wakes up and smells the rotting garbage; says the birth certificate issue is “politically a dead horse.” Corsi said that his books had no impact on the election. Birthers have been “marginalized and discredited.”
Corsi, however, still believes the stuff.
The birther who blogs as Butterdezillion is the bane of all things Hawaii Department of Health, and one of her latest creations is a bad smell issued about Loretta Fuddy, the Director of the Hawaii Department of Health. She says Fuddy created a string of fake birth certificates renumbered to make a place to insert one she created for Obama.
The State of Hawaii requires financial disclosure from its top officials and the 2011 and 2012 disclosure forms from Fuddy are online:
Following the Birther Peter Principle, the birther digs into the details until they find something they don’t understand, and then declare fraud. Birther ecinck came up with the idea for a possible motive for Fuddy to fake the certificates. Here’s what Butterdezillion said in a Free Republic thread:
When it comes to the financial stuff I am a total moron
But she warms up to the fraud angle nonetheless. What they don’t understand is how Dr. Fuddy could buy an apartment valued at $500,000 and pay down some debt on her $100,000 salary. Wow was it a payoff for making, as birthers claim, for fake birth certificates?
I’m not a total moron financially, and I can see that the financial disclosure forms do not provide much information about the official’s total assets. It only lists a few narrow categories. Nothing indicates new income associated with these two events.
Never mind the fact that the previous Republican director of the Department of Health, Dr. Fukino, said in an official statement that Obama’s birth records were already on file in accordance with state regulations. Never mind Hawaii’s Republican governor Linda Lingle said the same.
It’s just another excuse to stay in denial.
Peter Principle (birther version): A birther will dig into the details of the President’s long-form birth certificate image until they reach their level of incompetence with electronic documents, and then declare it a "forgery."
Completing a complex argument is hard work. In a mathematical proof, there is no room for skipping a step. The proof is either complete and fully justified, or it is nothing.
Giving up short of the mark is what I see in birther image analysis. Birthers start out to prove something, not to learn the truth, but putting that aside what they do is to look and look and look at the birth certificate that the White House released until they find something that they don’t understand. Now none of these guys really knows the details of how compression algorithms work. None of them even knows exactly what compression algorithm was used by the White House. Nevertheless, they start with some knowledge, they may search on the Internet for more, and they may do experiments; but ultimately they come upon something that they do not understand. The unbiased observer when stumped just says, “I don’t know.” Birthers, as the ultimate biased observers, when they reach an impasse declare victory and assign the desired conclusion to what they do not understand: forgery. That is the essence of birther image analysis: rising to their own level of incompetence and then claiming victory, an inevitable outcome of the methodology when you think about it.
Then they fall back on the defense of asking others to prove them wrong. Proof doesn’t work that way.
A few weeks ago, I got an email from someone I knew, forwarded a number of times before. It offered some plain talk about treating cancer. It was attributed to John Hopkins (sic) hospital, and said that cancer feeds on artificial sweeteners and that if these and some other foods were avoided, the cancer would starve and toxic chemotherapy could be avoided.
Johns Hopkins Medical had nothing to do with this ersatz advice, and even has a web page debunking it. But I ask, why would someone forward medical advice on the Internet just because they had read something in an email? You can die taking advice like that.
A couple weeks later another multiply-forwarded email arrived. It said that burns can be treated by throwing flour on them, and it will even prevent scarring. The story comes with anecdote of a soldier who was literally on fire being saved by having flour thrown on him. This is all nonsense. Flour doesn’t help and it can even catch fire! Every reputable source from the National Library of Medicine to the Mayo Clinic affirms what I hope your mother told you, put a common kitchen burn under cool running water to arrest further damage and ease the pain.
I hope that most people (apparently some of my friends excepted) have enough sense not to believe something just because it is on some web site or was forwarded in an email from someone they know.
Birtherism for a lot of people is no different from the crank medical advice in the preceding examples. Avoiding aspartame will not cure cancer, flour will not prevent a burn from scarring and no expert has found Obama’s birth certificate a forgery. What is important is the credibility of the source, not that it is written somewhere.
I hope you don’t believe something just because you read it on the Internet.
Maher introduces new term: “apers”
Note: Video contains words you can’t say on live TV.
The story is that Donald Trump is suing Bill Maher over a bet requiring Trump to prove he’s not the “spawn of his mother having sex with orangutan.” Trump somehow thinks that he met the burden of proof by sending Maher a copy of his birth certificate. Since Trump is on record as rejecting this kind of proof as it pertains to Barack Obama, he can hardly argue that he has met it in regards to himself.
But seriously, everybody knows that humans and orangutans can’t bear hybrid children, so Maher couldn’t have been serious, and Trump knows it. Nevertheless, when did nonsense ever stop Donald Trump?
The story is reported by none less than The Washington Times who said that the lawsuit was filed today. Later today a copy of the complaint, filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court surfaced at TMZ.com.
I want to add, with some hesitation, that the presence of a father’s name on a birth certificate is, in the case of a married couple, a presumption that the father is the husband, and in general it is a representation of the child’s mother as to who the father was. The presence of Fred Trump’s name on Donald Trump’s birth certificate would lead one, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to assume that he was indeed the father, but I wouldn’t consider it absolute proof where there is controversy.
Read more:
It’s sort of like the influenza that comes around every year, infecting some portion of the population, despite immunizations and good advice on infection control. Birther flu, by which I mean rumors that infect the brains of some people despite the immunization of facts from many places and good advice on critical thinking, keeps mutating and reappearing on a regular basis.
Just a few minutes ago I saw something on Twitter about Obama saying he was born in Kenya. The link was to a YouTube video, one which I recognized in a moment. The video (based on a spoof going back at least to the middle of 2010) published again on YouTube in November of 2012, is described this way:
You will have to turn up speakers to hear this but in this old video during Obama’s Senate Campaign years, he clearly states he is "Not an American, and was born in KENYA AFRICA".
What you get is a hugely degraded, both in video and audio, and edited copy of the spoof video from ObamaSnippets.com, who have been responsible for a series of spoof videos where Obama does everything from say he’s quitting in 2012 to appointing Snoop Dog to federal office. The video is not from Obama’s Senate Campaign; it’s from a Presidential Visit to Turkey in April of 2009 and words have been shuffled to say something wholly different from the authentic video. The original is crystal clear, and you don’t have to turn up your speakers.
Whether it is April Fools jokes that somebody believed, grandmother tapes, Obama executive orders sealing records, massive legal fees, or travel bans to Pakistan, these mental viruses just keep circulating, despite our best efforts at disinfection.
The debunker's guide to Obama conspiracy theories
Sometimes people leave comments designed to offend or outrage the reader, and invoke a firestorm of protest in response. These are the Internet trolls. Replying to them is feeding them and they will come back for more. Refusing to play their game encourages them to go away.
© 2013 Obama Conspiracy Theories. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Designed by 
Recent Comments