Topic: WorldNetDaily
For all of WorldNetDaily's recent revisionism attempting to shift the birther debate from "citizenship" to "eligibility," it hasn't lost its taste for the old-school, Obama-hating birther rant. Which brings us to a June 1 WND column by David Solway:
For it is not merely Obama's putative illegitimacy but the fact of Obama himself with all the harm he is doing both domestically and internationally that may conceivably lead to major dislocations, far worse than the disasters of Jimmy Carter's administration or the blowback naiveté of Woodrow Wilson's. Indeed, what we see developing is a cataclysm from which America may not be able to recover. That is why the legitimacy question needs to be pursued until it is settled one way or another. The stirring finale of Ezra Pound's celebrated Pisan Canto LXXXI serves as a cautionary tale: "Here error is all in the not done,/all in the diffidence that faltered." What is not helpful to the nation as a whole is precisely Obama's continued occupancy of the White House. This is the reason so burning an issue should not be suffered to just gutter out. For in the electoral framework, it seems the only way to dismiss Obama from office before his destructive term is up is via impeachment, and the only way this can conceivably happen is for the courts to accede to disclosure requests, assuming that Obama does indeed have something to hide.
And it sure looks like he does. Obama is the only president who has suppressed vital personal information; every other has made full disclosure. When the press raised a fuss about John McCain's birth particulars – since he was born in the Panama Canal Zone – he immediately released all his actual documents, thousands of pages worth, including those showing that he was a natural-born American citizen, as per the United States Code [8 U.S.C. 1403 (a)]. Obama did not follow suit, and the media let him off the hook. The document released online is not an authentic birth certificate. It is the "short form" affidavit, a Certification of Live Birth (COLB) with standard information left out, such as the actual name of the birth hospital and the name of the attending physician. In "Dreams from My Father," Obama mentions having found his birth certificate, which, as it turns out, was then conveniently lost in a small house fire. Nor would the two announcements in Honolulu newspapers confirming his birth constitute proof of American citizenship or be accepted as such in a court of law, for obvious reasons.
Nothing like citing an anti-Semitic fascist sympathizer like Ezra Pound to make your point.
Let's look at that second paragraph a little closer. Solway offers no evidence that McCain released "thousands of pages worth" of documents; he did release his birth certificate but never publicly released all of the related documents. WND reported in August 2009: "During his first presidential campaign in 1999, Sen. John McCain released 1,500 pages of medical and psychiatric records collected by the Navy. In 2008, McCain allowed reporters to spend three hours sifting through 1,200 pages of health records." Allowing reporters to view documents for a limited time is not the same thing as a public release. And WND does not indicate how many of the latter documents were duplicates of those released earlier.
Solway's supporting link for his claim that the certificate released by obama "is not an authentic birth certificate" goes to an analysis by an anonymous "expert analyst" boing by the name "Techdude." As we've detailed, "Techdude" has been discredited, and his credentials have been questioned as well.
solway's claim that Obama's original birth certificate was "conveniently lost in a small house fire" goes to a story that identifies itself as "satire." The Obama-haters at the Western Journalism Center seem to have fallen for this as well.
WND's embrace of such a factually deficient screed undermines whatever credibility it was trying to establish with its "eligibility" revisionism. But don't expect Joseph Farah and Co. to recognize that -- they're too far down the Obama-hate rabbit hole to notice.
(h/t to reader L.C. for research assistance.)
