Doctor Conspiracy
I was roaming the wide Internet this morning and happened upon a blog published by one Gabrielle Cusumano and I happened to notice her list of “Featured Articles” and one struck my eye: Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate is a Forgery. See and Read Why by Gabrielle Cusumano.
I naturally clicked on that link, ready to go over and debunk it unmercifully, but to my surprise, I agreed 100% with everything on it. In fact I wrote 100% of everything on it. Yes friends, the page was cut and pasted from ObamaConspiracy.org, a copy of Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate Doesn’t Really Say He Was Born in Hawaii. In really small type at the very bottom of this article there is an attribution: “Excerpted from:https://www.obamaconspiracy.org/category/birth-certificate/.” but alas no hyperlink.
The Irony here is that she apparently thinks that this article actually supports her anti-Obama foolishness. I would say something over there bit it’s more fun to have that subversive text sitting there working its white magic in midst of the den of iniquity. 😉
Well, she’s “a college graduate with a degree in Journalism as in the practice and knowledge of what use to be Journalism (Journalism 101- News Reporting and the like, straight news answering the five Ws in articles on the frontpage of the newspaper). There is a great need in the world for earnestness, truth, honesty and…” blah blah blah…
So what can we expect?;)
I hope other sites pick it up too. Congratulations.
I clicked on one of the links above and it says…..
“The page you requested cannot be found.”
I think she might have found out. lol
It’s there. Try this link:
http://gabriellecusumano.blogtownhall.com/2009/01/18/from_obama_conspiracyorg__barack_obama’s_birth_certificate_is_a_forgery.thtml
Yes the article has been renamed, and the heading is now changed with a more prominent attribution, nice. But it’s still a lonely little petunia in an onion patch. I guess. So much cutting and pasting, it’s hard to tell what her editorial position is.
This website is full of intellectual junk. In law school, we call this “mere conclusions” and therefore useless because there is no evidence to back up your conclusions. If only you were a lawyer Dr Conspiracy. Sadly not. It’s not too late. So you can still enroll. The legal types would recognize your website right away as lacking in legal content and depth.
And maybe you will censor this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogerian_argument
Anon, would you mind elaborating on your comment with examples because quite a number of lawyers frequent this site & generally agree with the reasoning & conclusions reached so it would be nice to know & understand your position ???
anon,
There are several lawyers among the commenters here, and from time to time they offer constructive criticism that results in corrections. Mostly they have nice things to say. I have respect for what lawyers do, and I realize that the articles here don’t measure up to a good legal brief, but I will not accept the claim that there is “no evidence”; one need only click around the articles here to put the lie to that claim. Do you have any constructive criticism about what you find to be a “mere conclusion”?
One of the problems with a web site this large (there are over 250 articles now) is that something is stated in one place with evidence attached, but maybe stated somewhere else without it. It can be quite tedious to put hyperlinks to everything in every article, but I would not want anyone to think that I just make stuff up here.
Why would I want to censor your comment? It makes you look bad to criticize with no specifics. Your comment is what we non-lawyers call “intellectual junk”–a claim to authority (“we lawyers”) without evidence that you are a lawyer and a broad generality (“no evidence”) which is false on the face of it and lacking in a single example. Why would I want to censor a comment that ridicules itself? [If your comment were a valid criticism, it wouldn’t be censored either.]
Some of the Rogerian principles have been helpful in my study. One good example is reading de Vattel and The Law of Nations. I spent a good deal of effort trying to show how the phrase “natural born citizen” in the Constitution is not from de Vattel and not trying to understand precisely what de Vattel was saying. A much better argument results from understanding de Vattel’s view (involving reading outside the “proof text” and its paragraph).
I have never been able to find an kernel of rational value in the arguments that Obama was born in Kenya. Here it is not so much a matter of understanding their viewpoint as it is researching their “evidence”. The redefinition of natural born citizen, on the other hand, is a minority view that can be understood. The problem with trying to find common ground here is that while one might make an argument for it based on certain value judgments, it is for our purposes a question of law and that question must have a binary answer.
There is certainly a large risk when dealing with polarized opposing views, not to pay attention to what the other is saying, or to hear what one expects to hear instead of what’s really there. An example here is when I read “national law” when Mountain Publius Goat was really saying “natural law”.