The Dr. West stuff is merely collateral information having little to do with the major points. A lady said she knew the doctor, had lunch with him IN HAWAII, and he said that he had delivered Obama.
SOOOO, the Birthers get to work and think they find that the good doctor retired in 1956 so therefore he could not have delivered Obama. But, apparently, he didn’t retire in 1956, and in fact worked up in the mid-70s. So he could have.
However, in the Birther Universe, there is no sense of perspective. Birthers get all caught up in the most minute of little details and each one gets the full conspiratorial treatment.
So, there’s a conspiracy because Dr. West couldn’t have done it, but the only reason why anyone thinks he was the doctor was the lady, and frankly, who cares what the lady said. It isn’t “inadmissible hearsay evidence” because there isn’t a trial and no one is seeking to enter it as evidence.
Frankly, if there was a trial, it would not be necessary to call the lady, but if one did, her testimony could probably be introduced as an exception to the hearsay rule.And depending on the legal venue, hearsay rules may not even apply.
But, as far as I am concerned, an HONEST Birther could no longer claim that Dr. West could not have delivered the baby because he was retired. But, I will bet you we see the claim made a whole bunch more times before this is over.
parsy, who puts little past the Birthers
Is the reliability of the "evidence" that got us to the
"conclusion" on Obama's Eligibility unimportant?
I calculated Dr. West's age myself back when his retirement at age 46 was first claimed and found it to be highly unlikely. However, there does not appear to be a claim that he delivered Obama himself, and the story seems to have been scrubbed from the web. Plus the woman has a potentially highly prejudicial personal relationship to Obama.
Based on my non-lawyer understanding of hearsay, there is no way that any hearsay exception would be granted to the person who told the Dr. West story, especially since this is “double hearsay” (he told me that he had heard/read about Stanley giving birth to BHO II). I am now highly interested in Dr. West's bound record of the vital statistics of each infant he delivered at K. hospital as a target of discovery!