Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah continues his revisionist history of Obama birtherism in his Aug. 3 column," which came out to mark Barack Obama's "purported birthday":
Donald Trump was hardly the first "birther." Neither was I. Nor was my colleague Jerome Corsi. And neither was Hillary Clinton.
That honor belongs to one person and one person alone – Barack Obama.
We all followed suit, but were not the first to raise it.
Obama went to extreme lengths to conceal his past. And, indeed, if he was born in the U.S. and was eligible to serve as president, he certainly did his best to create the mystery that led to the question being asked.
Farah went on to claim that Obama "billed himself as having been born in Kenya," citing only a blurb by a former book agent; in fact, the agent who edited the blurb said it was a fact-check error, and there's no evidence Obama himself ever signed off on that description.
But, of course, Farah quickly moved to rehashing old conspiracy theories:
His fans in the media will look back on their hero with feelings of nostalgia. Watch for it. There may be "birther" recaps written about me. I, after all, published the bestselling book "Where's the Birth Certificate," by Corsi.
I won't go into the voluminous amount of evidence of a cover-up, or all the valid reasons for questioning not only where Obama was born, but whether he had even retained citizenship when he and his mother left the country to move to Indonesia and enroll him in a Muslim school there over the objections of U.S. immigration officials concerned, at the time, about his citizenship status.
I won't go into his missing college records, which might shed light on whether Obama had claimed to be a foreign student, as many at Columbia assumed.
I won't go into the fact that his supposed "birth hospital" in Hawaii steadfastly refused to acknowledge publicly that simple fact for years, inexplicably.
Would that not be reason enough to investigate his background? But there's more.
The governor of Hawaii at the time, Neil Abercrombie, searched for the birth certificate and said he could not find it.
None of which prove Obama wasn't born in the U.S., but instead prove that he has privacy rights. Still Farah went on:
Then Obama refused to release his long form birth certificate throughout his entire first term in office, despite the controversies he had ignited years earlier.
The question of eligibility was real. His father was a native of Kenya and his mother was an under-age 17-year-old who might not be have been able to confer citizenship to her son.A birth certificate was eventually released for two reasons:
WND Books published "Where's the Birth Certificate?" by Jerome Corsi – and it went to No. 1 on Amazon. And, secondly, Obama's favorite fix-it law firm, Perkins Coie, was dispatch to Hawaii to finally "find" it, or so they say. Perkins Coie is the Democratic law firm that boasts "sharing" space with the FBI. Isn't that cozy?
I will add that the document has never been authenticated as genuine.
The "long form" birth certificate contained nothing that wasn't in the certificate Obama released. And it has been authenticated -- WND chose, rather than to accept it, concocted a false conspiracy theory that the PDF of the certificate that the Obama White House released was manufactured.Farah concluded:
Personally, I thought it was important to establish that Obama met the minimal constitutional litmus test for eligibility. For that I was vilified, called a racist, lampooned, besmirched, called a conspiracy theorist and worse.
It's worth recalling that in the 2008 election, the only "birther" issue to be raised by any media was the question of John McCain's eligibility. That one was driven home by the New York Times and had to be settled by a U.S. Senate investigation and unanimous vote that he was. McCain needed to turn over his birth certificate – because he was born in Panama. His parents were stationed there in the war. Obama never needed to show his birth certificate.
And that's the real story of who the first "birther" really was. It was Barack Hussein Obama.
But Farah lied to people to perpetuate his birtherism crusade in an attempt to destroy Obama. Instead, Farah destroyed any shred of credibiity WND had to push a false story. And even now -- as he has to beg for money to keep WND alive -- Farah can't stop lying.