Topic: WorldNetDaily
Les Kinsolving devotes his June 16 WorldNetDaily column (at least the part that doesn't regurgitate WND's attack on Fox News' Shepard Smith by rehashing a 9-year-old incident that has no bearing on current events) to two letters sent to White House press secretary Robert Gibbs by John Hemenway, whose previous lawsuit regarding Obama's birth certificate resulted in a reprimand from the judge for bring a "legally frivolous suit" to the court.
While Kinsolving describes Hemenway as a "World War II veteran, U.S. Naval Academy graduate, Rhode Scholar and Washington, D.C., attorney," he's too much of a loyal WND employee to deviate from company policy and note the numerous falsehoods in Hemenway's letters:
-- The birth certificate released by Obama's campaign "would not be acceptable to obtain a driver's license in most states in America." According to Andrew Walden at the right-wing FrontPageMag, the certificate is "the same document that anyone born in Hawaii shows when applying for a drivers’ license, social security card, passport, or security clearance. It was also accepted as valid by the election officials of the 50 states."
-- The certificate "was put on a laser printer before laser printers were available. It has been denounced as a forgery by competent authorities from Hawaii's Department of Home Lands." But the Hawaii Department of Home Lands does not issue official birth certificates (the state health department does) and, thus, is in no position to judge a certificate's authenticity. Further, as FactCheck.org notes, the certificate released by the Obama campaign was generated by the Hawaii state health department in June 2007 -- long after the invention of laser printers.
-- The certificate "is a record of birth not even used by the state of Hawaii's Department of Home Lands to establish Hawaiian ethnic identity." That would be relevant if Obama was seeking to establish Hawaiian ethnic identity in order to lease land from the state of Hawaii for homestead purposes. But as we've noted, he's nnot.
-- "Sun Yat-sen, a Chinese national, was issued a COLB ... [Sun] was born on 12 November 1866 in Cuiheng, China, but had a Hawaiian birth certificate and was officially a citizen of the United States." As the Honolulu Star-Bulletin reported, Sun was issued a birth certificate in 1904, when Hawaii was a territory -- not a state -- meaning that the certificate made Sun a "citizen of Hawaii," not a United States citizen. Sun's situation is irrelevant to Obama's.
-- "Barack Obama's paternal grandmother, Sarah Hussein Obama, claims he was born in Kenya, that she was present for the birth." That false claim is based on an edited transcript and translation issues, as David Wiegel reported at Slate (and we've noted); the full transcript shows that when Sarah Obama was asked the question more directly, "the translators ... tell him repeatedly that the president-elect was born in Hawaii."
Kinsolving really must stop enabling the lies of others.
