Topic: WorldNetDaily
If you're begging for money just to stay solvent, like WorldNetDaily is now, it might not be the best idea to remind folks you were a major promoter of one of the biggest fake-news stories of the past decade.
Not that WND sees it that way. In a Jan. 11 article rehasing birtherism, Bob Unruh blames CNN's Chris Cuomo for bringing up -- never mind that Unruh uses that hook to rehash the whole thing:
A mainstream reporter, CNN’s Chris Cuomo, this week resurrected the question of Barack Obama’s birth certificate during an interview with newly announced Arizona Senate candidate Sheriff Joe Arpaio.
It happened because the sheriff’s Cold Case Posse, when he was in office, responded to requests from constituents to investigate, and the only formal law-enforcement review of Obama’s document concluded the document released by Obama’s White House as his official birth certificate almost without doubt was a forgery.
[...]
His constituents had asked him for the review to ensure that Obama met the constitutional requirement of being a natural-born citizen.
“And we have the evidence,” the sheriff said. “Nobody will talk about it. Nobody will look at it. And anytime you want to come down, or anybody, we’ll be glad to show you the evidence.”
Questioned yet again by Cuomo about Obama’s document, Arpaio said it’s phony.
“No doubt about it. We have the evidence.”
Cuomo said a finding that a birth certificate was phony was the same as claiming that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, but that’s not necessarily the case. The era when Obama said he was born in Hawaii was a time when foreigners could obtain Hawaiian birth certificates.
[...]
Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse, comprised of volunteer law enforcement professionals, examined the printed image that Obama released and found nine points that corresponded with another document, suggesting strongly a forgery.
The suggestion was that a computer expert had copied and pasted Obama’s information onto the birth certificate of a woman born in Hawaii about the same time.
Let's rehash what Unruh refused to report, shall we?
First: the investigation, far from being a "respon[se] to requests from constituents," was sleazed into existence with a huge assist from WND. Then-WND reporter gave a presentation on his birther conspiracy theories to a tea party group in a town in suburban Phoenix called Surprise. Corsi then worked with the tea party group to lobby Arpaio to start the investigation.
Second: The Cold Case Posse investigation was not filled with "aw enforcement professionals" -- one of them was Corsi, who has no law enforcement experience.The leader ofthe posse, Mike Zullo, was a police officer in Delaware, hardly relevant experience, but appears to have worked longer as a day trader.
Third: The claim that "a computer expert had copied and pasted Obama’s information onto the birth certificate of a woman born in Hawaii about the same time" is likely bogus. As Dr. Conspiracy details, Arpaio and Zullo never actually prove that parts of Obama’s birth certificate were copied from the certificate of Johanna Ah’nee.
Fourth: Despite his invitation to Cuomo to "show [him] the evidence," Arpaio has never made public the supporting documentation behind its dubious conclusions-- particularly, the affidavit from Reed Hayes (who is a handwriting expert, not an expert in digital documents -- an important distinction given that the posse never examined a physical copy of any birth certificate Obama released) or the report from an Italian forensics laboratory. If Arpaio would just put it all on the web, nobody has to go to Phoenix and wonder why he's acting like he has something to hide playing gatekeeper for dubious evidence.
Fifth: Arpaio and Zullo have never coherently explained why they dismissed out of hand the most logical explanation for the purported anomalies in Obama's birth certificate -- they were created by scanning the birth certificate into a Xerox Workcentre 7655 multifunction printer to turn it into a PDF.
In short: The birther conspiracy is, and always has been, fake news. The fact that WND still pretends it's not is a big reason why it's circling the drain.
