Birther math (part 7) the final chapter

Here we end the analysis of a A Catalog of Evidence – Concerned Americans Have Good Reason to Doubt that Putative President Obama Was Born in Hawaii by attorney Mario Apuzzo. We’re adding up the value of the items in his catalog picking up from Birther math Part 6. Click HERE to start at the beginning.

I’m surely glad to have reached the end of this trek. Final thoughts will appear at the end. So far we’ve not encountered anything to make a reasonable person doubt President Obama’s eligibility to be president. It’s been a rehash of the Kerchner v Obama lawsuit (on appeal after being dismissed) with a touch of Berg v Obama and an unhealthy dose of Internet tabloid WorldNetDaily.

So with our second wind, I attack item 31.

(31) In his book, “Dreams From My Father, ” at page 126, Obama, in referring to himself and his mother and father, quotes his mother as saying: “Then you were born, and we agreed that the three of us would return to Kenya after he finished his studies.”…

In normal conversation where a family is going to the homeland of one member, this language would be used. Apuzzo’s objection is nothing more than ignorant literalism.

Score: 0.

(32) Did Obama Attend Columbia University As He Claims He Did? Something which goes to Obama’s credibility regarding his claim that he was born in Hawaii is his representation that he attended and graduated from Columbia University in 1983. But was he really there?… No one at Columbia remembers Obama at Columbia.

Some folks remembered him. His room mate remembers him (duh)! His other room mate remembers him.    One of his teachers remembers him. He published an article in a scho0l publication. And finally, how did Obama get into Harvard without an undergraduate degree? Apuzzo goes on (and I can hardly believe this) to cite the Pastor Manning “Blood of Jesus v Obama” trial in Harlem. A number of snide remarks come to mind, but will remain unspoken.

Score: 0.

(33) A college instructor who worked as a Senior Elections Clerk for the City and County of Honolulu in 2008 has stated in May 2010 that Obama was not born in Hawaii, and that a long-form, hospital-generated birth certificate does not exist in that State. Tim Adams now teaches English at Western Kentucky University, in Bowling Green, Ky. “There is no birth certificate,” said Tim Adams. “It’s like an open secret. There isn’t one. Everyone in the government there knows this.”

I contacted the City Clerk’s office  (the one that oversees the Elections Division) personally and they confirmed that their office has no access to birth records. Whatever Tim Adams heard (and he is very vague on the specifics) he didn’t get from where he worked. More likely he read it the same place Apuzzo gets his stuff: WorldNetTaily. Here is more discussion of  Tim Adams at Obama Conspiracy Theories. While Adams says he is not a racist, even though he attended a racist convention and appeared on a white supremacist radio program, remarks he has posted on the Internet in the past bring that in to question (well actually they show that he’s a racist), not that racists cannot tell the truth. It’s just that Adams has been caught in a web of lies. I suggest Apuzzo delete this one from his catalog. Adams is poison.

Score: 0.

(34) That the question of whether Obama was born in Hawaii is a legitimate question is evidenced by the fact that there are national and state political leaders who are now asking questions which show that Obama has not yet provided sufficient and credible evidence conclusively proving that he was born there.

Is this the “bandwagon” fallacy that I learned about in High School? (Perhaps Apuzzo would recognize argumentum ad numerum). Obama has provided evidence in the form of a birth certificate, and the State of Hawaii has verified, that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. If some loonies think they can pander to extreme right-wing conservatives, it’s evidence of nothing but their own error.

Score: 0.

(35) …Apart from the question of whether either or both alleged computer image of an alleged paper document are authentic, there are many problems with simply relying on a birth certificate as conclusive evidence of the place and date of birth….

Our system of determining presidential eligibility has served us well for over 200 years.  I don’t think it’s broken. No one was asking about birth certificates until Barack Obama came along and that only because someone made an edited and misrepresented recording of his step grandmother and pushed it viral on the Internet. WorldNetDaily boosted its reach by fanning the controversy by hawking every crank claim that came along. It may be that critical thinking is broken, at least in the case of Mario Apuzzo (if he actually believes any of this) and the birther movement, but this is a problem with public education, not the screening of presidential candidates.

It might be tempting to say that we should have a more rigorous process for vetting presidential candidates, given all the electrons wasted by the birthers and their debunkers.  I do not oppose stronger vetting of candidates, but I have no illusions that it would make the smears against Barack Obama go away.

Score: 0.

That’s the end–nothing there that hasn’t been discussed in far more detail on the Obama Conspiracy Theories blog, some in articles over a year old. All in all the Catalog proved disappointing in  that there was nothing novel or even challenging. Same old same old.

When a defense attorney tries to get his guilty client off, he creates another theory of the case and tries to make it sound plausible. He tries to cast doubt on the prosecutor’s case. It’s what they do; it’s what they take pride in. Apuzzo pulls out his rhetorical tricks, his spinning of tales, his casting of doubts to try to get the guilty birther mythology acquitted. If the jury had my high school English teacher, Mrs. Hurst, Apuzzo wouldn’t stand a chance.

Snowball's chance in hell

Thanks  to Mario Apuzzo for the image of Archimedes that appears at the head of each article.

Thanks for T.S. Elliot for an apt closing quotation in elegy for the birthers:

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Articles for further reading:

• Hollister v. Indonesian Citizenship Law
• Kerchner v. Obama and the WHOLE COUNTRY
• Kerchner v. Obama and the WHOLE COUNTRY (Part 2)
• Sarah Obama Speaks!
• Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate Doesn’t Really Say He Was Born in Hawaii
• Kerchner v. Obama and the WHOLE COUNTRY
• Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate is a Forgery – Part 1
• Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate is a Forgery – Part 2
• Obama was an Indonesian Citizen