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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28356 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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Obama's birth certificate? Can of worms, here we come.

It is a PDF with embedded images on multiple layers. This could have been case closed if it had been a high-quality scan.

But...

Now, document scanning was my professional trade for thirteen years. I'd made high-compression PDFs on a $200 all-in-one scanner/printer often enough to recognize how one looked at high magnification, and I had a tool which extracted the individual embedded images which indeed looked like the result of such a scan. Downloading it from archive.org confirms my original impression: although shoddy, it looks naturally shoddy, the kind made on an home/office scanner.

To people who haven't had the pleasure of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect first-hand, it's when you're an expert at something and you can smell the BS on a news article with a cursory glance. In my case, I could tell that it would have been far easier to forge the document with a 600dpi TIFF brought into Photoshop, edited, resized, and exported, than to deal with the tangled mess of a high-compression PDF generated by an algorithm built into a scanner or (in this case apparently) a similar high-compression conversion to PDF by software built into the Macintosh's operating system. Everything from the white haloing to the 1-bit scans of text right next to greyscale numbers is within my experience.

But to anyone else with a cursory knowledge of PDFs and image conversion, it looked like the worst forgery in the world.

Obama's birth certificate? Can of worms, here we come.

If the whole birth certificate brouhaha was supposedly about Obama's eligibility as "natural born citizen", then it was about nothing.

Even if Ann Durham made, back in 1961, arduous and pointless trip to Kenya to give a birth there, according to US law Obama would be natural born citizen.

Were Obama actually born outside of the United States, then it would appear that under this statute he would not be a “citizen of the United States at birth.” His father was unquestionably a citizen of Kenya, then part of the British Empire, and his eighteen-year-old mother could not have lived in the United States for a minimum of five years after obtaining the age of fourteen. (She could not have done this because she was only 18 when he was born on August 4, 1961. She did not meet the five years “after attaining the age of fourteen years” requirement until the following November 29, when Obama was almost four months old.) Consequently, under this counterfactual scenario, Barack Obama would appear to be ineligible to be president.

However, on November 14, 1986, when Obama was twenty-five years old, Congress enacted an amendment to the above statute, which substituted “five years, at least two” for “ten years, at least five” in the language describing the length of time the citizen parent had to live in the United States after age fourteen. This new standard, unlike the one adopted in 1952 and in effect in 1962, was met by Obama’s mother when she turned 16, more than two years before the birth of her son.

But we all know it was not about some piece of paper. What the birthers wanted to say was:

"Obama is not American, he is rootless cosmopolitan CIA baby with very suspicious early life who has nothing in common with ordinary Americans of any race. All his efforts to pose as "real black American" are pathetic farce."

"He is not one of us, we do not want someone like him, we do not trust someone like him to represent us."

But they hadn't said this, either they feared to be called racist (they were called racist anyway) or loathed to start debate "What makes someone an American?" and open this can of worms.

Instead they brayed about PDF layers and wasted everyone's time. Good riddance to this movement.

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