Clearing the Smoke on Obama's Eligibility | Western Journalism.com

Clearing the Smoke on Obama's Eligibility | Western Journalism.com

On July 17, 2009 CNN’s Kitty Pilgrim lied when she stated that the Obama campaign had produced “the original birth certificate” on the internet and that FactCheck.org had examined the original birth certificate. The Certification of Live Birth that was posted by the campaign and FactCheck.org is not, and by definition, cannot be the original birth certificate or a copy of the original birth certificate. It contains no space for the signature of a doctor or midwife. It contains no space for the hospital or house where Barack Obama was born. There is no space on the Certification for any probative evidence that can be checked up on to see whether the Certification is valid. There were no computer generated Certifications of Live Birth in 1961, the year Obama was born.

Actual 1961 Certificate of Live Birth that Obama refuses to release

The digital copy that Obama did release

Obama’s original birth certificate was a very different document from this Certification of Live Birth on FactCheck.org. that Kitty Pilgrim, Chris Matthews, Jonathan Alter, and Keith Olbermann have waved around to end the discussion. On the FactCheck.org web site, the claim is made that “FactCheck.org staffers have now seen, touched, examined and photographed the original birth certificate.” They only saw and touched the Certification of Live Birth. So FactCheck.org is lying about this as well.

FactCheck.org gets its prestige from a reputation for objectivity. Why would those who run this site choose to tell so obvious a lie and so endanger the site’s reputation? The answer is in the date of the posting, August 21, 2008. It was in mid-August that questions about the Certification of Live Birth began to reach a critical mass and threaten to enter the public discourse. The mostly pro-Obama television and newspaper/magazine media had to be given an excuse and cover for their collective decision to dismiss or ignore the substantial questions about whether Obama met the qualifications for the office set forth in Article II section I of the Constitution. And those reporters and editors who were not in the tank for Obama had to be deceived. After Labor Day the swing voters would begin to pay attention to the Presidential campaign. The truth had to be killed. And with its lie about “how it examined and photographed the original birth certificate“, FactCheck.org killed it.