Articles that didn’t make it

Not every article I start gets finished or published.

Street Preacher in the News

One article I started in March of 2009 involved street preacher Ron McRae that birther watchers may remember as the man who recorded his phone call with Sarah Obama in which she seemed to say that she was “present” (in translation) when Obama was born. The unedited version shows that this misunderstanding was quickly corrected. In these days of anti-Muslim activism, that story from 2009 seems worth mentioning.

At the time a design had been selected for the Flight 93 National Memorial that involved a crescent shape. McRae called it an Islamic symbol and said “it’s a slap in the face” to the victims and their families. He said that attorneys for his Street Preachers Fellowship in Lancaster, PA, were looking into obtaining an injunction to stop the design, reported the Lancaster Tribune-Democrat. Because of the controversy, the crescent was changed to a circle.

Orly Needs Our Help

This was a facetious plea for Obama Conspiracy Theories readers in February 2012 to help Orly Taitz with a problem on her web site. Taitz said:

Attention Users of Internet Explorer:
Internet Explorer users may be infected with viruses that can crash their computers when browsing or commenting in this website.
Please switch to Mozilla Firefox, or Safari. Other browsers that may be used are Chrome and Opera.

I characterized her web site design: “Her main page reminds me of my computer desk–a bunch of junk thrown around without any sense of order or regard for appearance.” I rambled on at length about Internet security and browsers, and I included this chart of browsers used to visit Obama Conspiracy Theories:

Wow, has that changed today! It’s changed in the total amount of traffic, and in the browser distribution.

That article looks complete and I’m not sure why I didn’t publish it.

“Original birth certificate”

This was a tutorial article, and I wish I had it recently as part of a discussion at Gerbil Report with its resident troll RamboIke. This one was also from February of 2012, and it explains that “original birth certificate” has two meanings because “birth certificate” has two meanings. One is the birth report submitted to a jurisdiction and registered, and the other is the certified copy of that report issued by a jurisdiction. The ambiguity allows the true statement to be made, “Obama’s attorney showed the President’s original birth certificate to the press” while a birther says, “no one in the public has seen Obama’s original birth certificate.”

I just published this article over at Gerbil Report™. It needed some new content.

The Obama Conspiracy Theories guide to debating

That one was really aimed at comments on this blog. It wasn’t much developed, but here is what I had:

1) Start small. Don’t throw out a large number of claims. Pick one thing and follow it through to the end. Then start the next thing.
2) Don’t feel you have to answer everything anybody says. Just follow the argument and reply to the points raised.
3) Don’t get your feelings hurt if you’re insulted. I try, but I can’t get everybody to be civil.
4) Expect that anything you assert will be challenged, so you might as well give your sources in your original argument.
5) Avoid vague general statements and things you know you can’t demonstrate. In particular avoid appeal to anonymous authority or a consensus you can’t show exists.

The little argument that wasn’t all there

Now this was a very interesting coincidence because this article was the beginning of a response to an article at Obama Release Your Records (now Birther Report) from May of 2011. In fact I was just looking at that very same article just this past week. The article was: “New Analysis On Obama’s Birth Certificate Number: The Little Man Who Wasn’t There!!” What interested me on my recent visit was how clever the title is, with the “little man” referring to newborn Barack Obama, and “wasn’t there” referring to him allegedly not appearing in the number sequence of birth certificates in Hawaii. The title refers to the poem “Antigonish” by Hughes Mearns. Squeeky Fromm writing as “Head Researcher” published her own version titled “Antifactish” in a comment here.

I think I never got into writing the article because the ORYR piece was so long and tedious. I said as much at the time:

Sometimes I think that the birthers write these painfully long and logically contorted articles just to get revenge on the normals who try to read them.

I had forgotten that Jerome Corsi was once deep into Hawaii birth certificate numbering nonsense. That topic has been amply covered on this blog since then.

Terry Lakin homecoming celebration

Another article is from May of 2011, the month after Barack Obama released his long form birth certificate. I was actually a bit more than an hour’s drive that day from BWI airport when Terry Lakin’s plane landed. I decided against showing up. I thought it might get “complicated.”

Scavenger hunt

That might make a good idea for a future contest—we haven’t had one of those in a while. This one, again from May of 2011 involved an obscure quest:

What his Heltan Maganga’s middle name?

And today, I do not have a clue.

Crisis?

I’ll bring to a close this serving of leftovers with one that seems remarkably appropriate today, even though it was from April of 2011. It involves Donald Trump, and I will paste in the whole article draft below:

Donald Trump embraced birtherism and his popularity among Republican voters shot up. That’s a fact that’s hard not to pay attention to if one wants to appeal to Republican voters.

Every single Republican member of the Arizona House and Senate (except one who was absent) voted for the so-called “birther bill” HB2177. Three Fox News personalities (the newest being Steve Doocy) have now come out calling for Obama to release the certificate. Even Bill O’Reilly, one firmly in the “birthers are crazy” camp, has said that it’s time for Barack Obama to release the certificate and put an end to the controversy. Michele Bachmann, who had previously toyed with the birthers, says, “Obama should show The ‘Birth Certificate’ and let it be examined to make sure it is a legal document.” Meanwhile Carl Rove is warning “it’s a trap!”

This is lining up to be not a battle between Obama and the Republicans but a battle among Republicans. I remember back to the 1972 election, a political cartoon, probably by Doug Marlette then of the Charlotte Observer, depicting one Democrat out on a tree limb with another Democrat sawing the limb off, while Nixon was taking an axe to the whole tree. I can envision a similar cartoon with a moderate Republicans elephant out on the limb with the Tea Party character sawing off the limb with a saw labeled “BIRTHERS” while Obama is chopping down the tree.

So is this a crisis in the Republican party?

Learn more:

• Doug Marlette classic cartoons