True. Though the constitutional issues and political issues often get mixed in ways that leave me wondering if the person commenting appreciates the distinction.
No one among the general public has been allowed access to he original hand-signed paper copy of his birth certificate.
And if some person were to be allowed in to view that document and that person were to emerge and say "what I saw looks just like the WHLFBC," do you think for a moment that would quell the controversy? Or, rather, is it likely that the cries of "the person was threatened or bribed into saying that!" or "they must have created another forgery and showed that as the 'original!'" would immediately follow? Birther history strongly suggests the latter. I strongly doubt granting access to the original would accomplish much.
If the original on file in Hawaii does not square precisely with the White House pdf it is not necessary to conclude that a large number of people had to be aware of the discrepancy for a substantial period of time.
But on what basis is there to suppose a discrepancy? The Indonesian school application supports the Hawaiian place of birth and date. The newspaper birth announcements on August 13, 1961, support the parents being Stanley Ann and BHO, Sr. The State of Hawaii has thrice attested that the information on the WHLFBC matches the information on the original record in their files. And all the supposed "anomalies" in the digital document that gave rise to the initial suspicions have now been shown to be re-creatable via a Xerox Workstation and Mac Preview.
You surely can concede that sometimes details are held close to the chest in order to avoid some degree of embarrassment or confusion.
Of course. Though as I noted in the prior post, if "Team Obama" was conspiring to hide or change some part of the narrative, they were doing so from Day 1. So if the family was trying to hide that the father was someone other than BHO, Sr. (e.g., by creating a false newspaper birth announcement), then there's no reason to think that they told the Hospital or Ha. Dept. of Health anything different. So the paper copy is in all likelihood simply going to state the same things the WHLFBC states (and Hawaii has already said as much).
(And other than the parent(s) not being as stated, or BHO II not being born in the place stated, what other information on the long form certificate could POSSIBLY entail the least bit of embarrassment or concern?)
Now I realize you may be tempted to counter at this point with the tiresome: “Well, so long as he’s eligible who cares about trivial details like whether his name was misspelled . . . .” I care, and so should many others because Obama has implied repeatedly that the document he published is the real thing. Even if some technicality exists that exempts him from charges of criminal forgery or perjury or fraud, that doesn’t change the fact that he has openly ridiculed all those who express doubts about the documents.
Yes, but when Obama was vouching for the document and critics were questoning it, the issue was not misspellings and typos.
If Obama is sustaining a false representation of his birth circumstances, do you think voting citizens should be kept in the dark about that?
No. But I think that "if" not being grounded on other than a "Spidey sense" suspicion (or worse, as others do, grounded on the latest wackadoodle theory) just gives Obama something to play to his political advantage.
Hmm, is there nothing else that might cause parents to desire their child to have paperwork on file establishing his American citizenship free of any need for naturalization or other red-tape later on down the road?
Making clear the child's U.S. citizenship would be a reason, of course. And that motivation would account for both the Hawaii newspaper announcements and the INS records on BHO, Sr., stating he had a son born in Hawaii. But it's hard to presuppose those statements were in the face of contrary information on file with the Department of Health. So the logical conclusion is that the vital records even then indicated Hawaiian birth as well.
So either way you slice it, the argument (and here I have in view one being made to a judge or Congressperson) for compelling access to the Dept of Health paper copy comes up short. Either 1) the newspaper announcements, INS files, Indonesian school application and recent verifications from Hawaii all attest to Obama's Hawaiian birth because Obama really was born there (what I would term the "Occam's Razor" answer) or 2) everyone (including Hawaii) was conspiring from Day 1 to make it look like Obama was born in Hawaii (in which case there's no reason to think the paper copy will tell any different story).
[W]hy could they not have had the foresight to coordinate supervised direct access to the original bound vault copy for forensics experts including at least one who is not the political ally of Obama?
Perhaps because they understand that under our Constitutional system, with its Full Faith & Credit clause, the ultimate authority as to the authenticity and contents of a state-issued record is the issuing-state itself, not "forensic experts." So "it is so, because we say so" is, while perhaps a bit colloquial, the correct answer here.
And so, in your opinion, government agencies and individuals vying for and holding the highest office in the land should not be checked or held accountable when it comes to toying with a minority segment of the populace that annoys them?
We live in a democracy. In this case, where not even a sizeable percentage of Republicans/Conservatives are inclined to chase these issues, the majority rules. And, to the chagrin of those few holdouts, Birthers are not a protected minority.
I want to know what has been misrepresented about Obama’s past and for what reasons, and I want to know who was complicit in the deceit and/or cover-up to follow.
Is your hypothesis (implicitly that there has been misrepresentation and cover-up) falsifiable? And by that I mean what would it take to persuade you that there has been no significant misrepresentation? (And I'm qualifying this with the term "significant" because one can always find something to quibble in a biography, as with any historical account).
I've already suggested my view is that with "Joe Birther" generally the answer is "there is nothing that will peruade me." But I don't wish to lump you in categorically without a chance to answer.
Taking a minute to let you know that I realize you’ve put considerable time into that last post. I’ve been struggling to make priority for the time to get my answers down in this form, especially since I’m trying to ease away from my Birtherism hobby. In any case, I haven’t forgotten, and may yet one day respond.
I’m stopping in just now to say that Gallups’ latest comments released this morning have us looking at “sooner than later.” That, combined with the fact that Mark Gillar was tweeting the phrase “in a few weeks” not many days ago, has me feeling fairly sure that my prediction that we wouldn’t hear anything until mid-May was probably on the optimistic side. Perhaps it would be safe to start thinking no earlier than June now.
As before though, they haven’t been backing off on the superlatives when describing the significance of their findings, which makes it challenging for me to convince the giddy adolescent inside of me that it’s still unwise to have heightened expectations.
Time will tell, and in the vast meantime, who knows, I might just manage to find plenty of time to pen a proper response to your post #65.
...do you think for a moment that would quell the controversy? Or, rather, is it likely that the cries of "the person was threatened or bribed into saying that!" or "they must have created another forgery and showed that as the 'original!'" would immediately follow?
I admit that it would certainly do almost nothing to quell controversy unless perhaps some combination of the following conditions applied:
It’s this thing about a "posture of openness” in my item #3 above that I think could have helped me enormously to believe that Obama’s claims and documents were on the up and up. If Obama and HDOH have nothing to hide, then why shouldn’t they have been willing to be open and responsively working to nip-in-the-bud those many doubts while the election cycle of 2008 was still underway?
Let me attempt to address some of the some of the talking points your fellow Obama apologists typically use to explain HDOH’s reticence. As I’m sure you’re aware, a key element in my argument is that I regard the behaviors of the Obama Campaign, The White House, the HDOH and other HI state agencies and a few indirectly connected parties to be inconsistent with a circumstance in which there is nothing needing to be hidden about Obama’s identity and past. Here I will be focussing mostly on just the HDOH and especially their posture starting from the 2008 campaign and on through to the opening months of Obama’s presidency .
First, the HDOH sees its policy to withhold copies of long-form birth certificates as discretionary. This is why when push came to shove much later on, the HDOH made an exception to its policy, independent of any changes to State laws, and issued a supposed long-form copy to Obama after all. Second, individuals claim to have specifically requested and to have received long-form copies of their own B.C.s directly from the HDOH during the time frame surrounding Obama’s candidacy and inauguration and beyond. Third, this testimony is wholly unsurprising given that during much of the same time period, the state’s Home Lands program’s official web site directed applicants to request long-form BC copies from the HDOH to ensure that evidence of their eligibility was sufficient.
Did you catch the significance of that last point? Ironically, the state itself had a program that had regarded, well into 2008, its own short-form abstract birth certifications to lack sufficient evidentiary content to substantiate their claims upon state afforded resources. Nevertheless, HDOH and the Obama campaign had scant sympathy for Obama’s political opponents who felt an unverified digital representation of the purported short form (released at first with its serial number redacted) was to flimsy a basis on which to extend him the right to be elected the most powerful man on Earth?
Furthermore, if the HDOH was just hell-bent on upholding policies and laws meant to protect privacy, why was then director Chiyome Fukino able to release statements, first that a birth certificate is on file, but later and more to the point that the dept’s "vital records" (note the plural) indicated Obama was a "natural-born American citizen"? Would someone like to explain which policies give the HDOH discretion to unilaterally produce official public statements about selective portions of the content and secondary implications of ostensibly Obama’s original birth certificate(s) and which ones were then barring them from releasing even so much as an image of the long form?
Hawaii allows record copies to be issued to not only the individual of record, but also to family members and to those with a tangible interest. What is a person with tangible interest? Could that phrase potentially mean a third party who has a need to verify an individual’s identity claim in order to ensure that money (such as an inheritance or a scholarship) is distributed only to those qualified? Could tangible interest include the needs of litigant or attorney in a lawsuit or criminal prosecution when pertinent evidence can determined through review of vital records? Are those the only cases? Could it not possibly be stretched to include the needs of voting citizens governed by a constitution which establishes a particular birth requirement among the qualifications for holding the republic’s highest office?
At this point I can almost hear you raring back with your legal dictionary ready to pummel me over my utter failure to grasp the concept or technical meaning of "tangible interest.” If that is the case, please feel free to proceed by describing the criteria under which a third party's need to see a vital record does indeed rise to the level of “tangible interest.” I sure I’m not the only one who would enjoy a little lesson on what cases are regarded by those fluent in technical legalese as substantiating more legitimately “tangible interest” than the particular case of determining whether a candidate for or an occupant of the highest office in the nation meets the constitutional requirements thereof. Don’t worry, you need not condescend to the point of prefacing your definition by reminding me that "terms of art” shouldn’t be misconstrued to bear any sensible relationship the the most obvious natural meaning of their words as understood by unenlightened plain folk like me. I daresay we’ve all heard enough of that already.
Regardless of the degree to which “tangible interest” may be technically aloof from the lowly concerns of voting taxpayers, opposition candidates and military personnel, I contend that the term could have been stretched easily and safely to cover the curious case of Candidate Obama—provided that there was nothing in such a usage that would tend to implicate any wrongdoing. In such an innocent case as that, surely stretching the tangible interest clause would be at least as safe as imagining up those policies that allowed Fukino to go on record about what HDOH records exist and what they say about Obama. This goes to a larger point that is applicable to virtually all doubts about the HDOH’s integrity: What penalty or liability or injured party or lawsuit can be found threatening by anyone when it comes to releasing Obama’s records in 2008--if in fact such a release could only serve to prove that his public claims were thoroughly and utterly honest?
Nevertheless, as you will now prudently remind me, the law is the law, and honorable men could never be so unjust as to think of taxpayers and soldiers as having a tangible interest in documents that reveal whether their next chief executive is lawfully, constitutionally qualified to serve. Have it your way, then. For the sake of argument, let us concede that there are really good reasons to not violate the sanctity of “tangible interest” with the unreasonable burdens of Americans who wish to abide by the Constitution.
So, without tangible interest to aid us, let us consider that the President could have at least simply spared the expense of roughly one c-note and signed off on a request to have official copies of his records sent by certified mail to such destinations as perhaps administrators of the federal elections committee, three or four major news outlets, both of the U.S. congressional chambers and the national headquarters of the RNC. Why wouldn’t this have happened very early on if everything was above reproach? Of course you surely wouldn’t argue tangible interest must be established for parties when they themselves have been specifically designated by the principal of record as the intended addressees? See how simple that step would have been in the early days of growing doubt?
So let’s suppose that the HDOH felt a great need to be relatively undisclosing about Obama not because there is anything questionable in his records, but because they felt it would create a future circumstance in which there would be new and mounting pressure to release private information about individuals that would potentially prove controversial and damaging. To make this argument hold the greatest weight, we could even include the idea that HDOH is harboring some information about one or more people not directly connected to Obama that if released could portend criminal implications for one or more individuals within the HDOH for gross failure to follow policies or some such corruption.
There are two simple reasons this argument does not hold water. First, throughout the early months of doubts about the vital records, Obama was in the exceedingly rare circumstance of being one of a handful of presidential frontrunners, becoming eventually the DNC nominee and ultimately the President elect. Hawaii needed only to say something narrow like, “We’re making this historical one-time exception because Obama is the DNC nominee for President and was born to a non-citizen parent within 3 years of Hawaii becoming an officially recognized State." They could have even added the qualifier that there was in Obama’s case also a conflict released from presumably official sources within Obama’s campaign about which Hospital was the site of his birth. What are the odds that a precedent built upon such an unlikely set of circumstances would ever need to be reapplied to anyone else?
Second, Hawaii was apparently not feeling very threatened by potential damages that could precipitate from making a precedent by granting an exception, because ultimately they did just that in Obama’s case, and to date the HDOH has been subjected to no pressure or public outcry to adhere to the Obama precedent with respect to anyone else--at least anyone else not potentially wrapped up directly in the Obama controversy. Of course, I add that latter clarification because there was one relatively noteworthy case subsequent to the April 2011 long-form exception made for Obama in which the plaintiff might have leveraged the precedent set in Obama’s case. That case, though, was about Virginia Sunahara, and the only reason the release of her long-form might have borne troubling consequences was if it spelled out problems related to the serial number portrayed as belonging on Obama’s long-form. But, if we go back to our presupposition that there’s nothing at all troubling about Obama’s birth certificate then there would never have been a reason for concern about someone seeking the long-form of Sunahara who died within a day of her birth.
The instantly visible flaw of this argument is that HDOH is not not controlled by Obama’s campaign advisors, and thus it seems unreasonable to assume that HDOH personnel would have been willing to bear much of a burden at all just because they had perceived that the Obama campaign/administration wanted their assistance in milking the kooky controversy for all its worth for as long as possible.
As to the question of whether or not burdensome pressure was brought to bear upon HDOH, the evidence is clear. Representatives of the HDOH publicly portrayed the department as besieged and paralyzed by a relentless onslaught of questions and FOIA requests.
The above list is a brief summary of the forces bearing upon multiple agencies in the Hawaiian government that went as high as the to Governor herself. Surely this sufficiently illustrates the Obama birth certificate doubts did impose a very tangible strain on Hawaiian state resources and budget.
Given all the strain, what could possibly have been reason enough to make Hawaii willing to endure it for month after month just to keep taxpayers and political opponents from getting a wide open view of the private records whose full content would only confirm exactly what Obama had already publicly disclosed to all the world? Would the HDOH have willingly protected his privacy against the encroaching mob just as a favor to the Chicago campaign publicist who winked in their direction. Why expend so much energy to help a politician sustain his juvenile, selfish ruse and thus keep a bunch of kooks preoccupied? Would the campaign have directed a tight-lipped HDOH posture through a written memorandum (perhaps on threatening attorney office letterhead), given the risk that one day that correspondence might bubble to the surface? How even could such a letter convince Hawaii that there were any real teeth in the legal threats, given that their records would only serve to verify what Obama had been trumpeting openly. Did they think Obama’s lawyers would actually go to the extreme of bringing a lawsuit over their actions to reaffirm Obama’s own statements?
Taking a step back, let’s stop to again consider whether an uncompromising devotion to the letter of the law is likely what motivated Hawaii to prefer to languishing under the resource crunch rather than opening the vault door in the hopes of relieving much of the pressure that was constantly building. As I have already pointed out, releasing a copy of Obama's long-form to him personally and arguably to his designated third party recipients was already clearly allowed within the legal discretion of the HDOH. What’s more, HDOH’s practices allowed for an official documentary verification of the record to be sent to a third party under a certain circumstances, one of which was merely that the party requesting was doing so for educational purposes. Was no one able to meet that meager burden so that a verification could have been released in the in the autumn of 2008? Did Hawaii officials figure doing so would be a detriment to their organizational mission?
Nevertheless, no one was ever granted a letter of verification from the HDOH until there was a very real threat of renewed media attention. The dam finally broke in 2012 when Arizona’s Secretary of State expressed through a news outlet his frustration at the eight-and-counting weeks of delay for an answer to his indisputably valid request for verification. He expressed that Obama was at risk of being barred from Arizona ballots and suddenly, four years after the controversy originally arose, an HDOH associate quietly signed a page of legalese on Alvin T. Onaka’s behalf, applied the registrar's stamp and stuffed the first-ever Obama record "verification” into an envelope bound for the Grand Canyon State. Seemingly a letter of verification worded with inescapable clarity and thoroughness could have been issued to scores of requesters at any time over the campaign and years prior, but Hawaii wouldn’t budge—not even for a full year after the long-form scan had already been published to the White House web site!
Yes, but they did eventually verify the record, you say? Permit me now to make a very brief side-trip into the anatomy of high-stakes institutional deception. When officials in a corporation or an agency are caught between a rock and a hard place over a truth that they would prefer to conceal, the actions they take in any given moment are dictated by the relative strength in that instant of opposing forces either to stay quiet, to preserve plausible deniability, to muddle the issue with parallel but misleading distractions or to tell lies enshrouded by varying degrees of self-protective fuzziness. In general this means organizations will tend withhold comment or talk about the weather all day long until legitimate jeopardy of substantive penalties hits a fever pitch. Only at the boiling point can these entities be expected to start telling bolder lies about their nefarious secrets. I submit this principle proves quite useful as a lens through which one can gain insight into a broad array of the actions taken by the HDOH and Obama’s handlers since the days of 2008. It also makes for a very reasonable explanation of the odd wording chosen not only for the Arizona verification but also for the subsequent one issued to Kansas--the latter of which I note was conspicuously non-responsive to the very direct question about the pdf being an exact copy. As far as that goes, it’s worth considering how this principle applies to the attending factors in April 2011 when Obama suddenly demonstrated the long form could be made available to him, after all.
See my response to argument 4 above. There was no rest for the Hawaiian government so long as it continued to hold its cards so close to the chest. That was a truth which constantly beckoned the decision makers to reevaluate their tact. Those cause and effect realities could not have been muffled or soothed by any assurance of Hawaii’s right to defiantly proclaim “It is so because we say it is so” under the Constitution's Full Faith and Credit clause. For always they knew that there remained a hope for relief, if at any time they could have mustered the all the mighty courage it would take to face the horrifying consequences of using readily available, legal avenues to open up the books and simply admit that their records could irrefutably confirm all Obama had said was true.
On this point, I will yet once again give consideration to the scant possibility that the folks at the HDOH were unwilling to find rest through a path of greater disclosure because they were ever abiding by an unflagging altruistic allegiance to what they regarded to be the requirement of the policies and privacy statutes to which they were bound. So then, if Hawaii’s reticence was rooted in her school marm commitment to remain ruly without reproach, might they have found any other escape valve by which to vent the mounting pressures that were daily stealing away their resources? I can think of at least one such valve, a valve so readily available and yet so perfectly avoided it remains in my thoughts as one of the more compelling arguments for my case. “If you want to know more about our records related to Barack Obama, just ask him.” Why, in the midst of all their statements, all their defensive measures, all their coping mechanisms did the Hawaiian officials never turn to that valve in any capacity, neither officially nor off the record nor through any single of their would-be surrogates, why?
Perhaps HDOH supposed it wouldn’t have worked; perhaps they figured the record-requesting hounds would have remained relentlessly trained on the HDOH regardless. But it would have been so easy a thing to try, and they could have done so at any and all points along the way! For goodness sakes, the HDOH bothered to deflect to the Attorney General, the governor and the entire Hawaiian state legislature to find relief. Why did they never deflect to Hawaii’s own up-and-coming favorite son? “He can show you what we’ve sent him in person.” "He can request that more copies of our records be sent out.” “He can proclaim his intent to waive his rights to privacy with respect to our files.”
Hawaii never went there. Nope. Never even implied such an idea. Is it possible Hawaii felt really sure from day one that Obama was in no mood to help?
My treatment of the above arguments may raise a new question in your mind: If the HDOH’s reticence subjected the department to so great a hassle and burden that a prudish obsession with the rules--even if combined with a desire to play along with Obama’s ruse—would not constitute sufficient motivation to for the agency to endure so faithfully, then what on earth would compel them to be so quiet for so long?
Everything changes once we drop the stipulation that Obama has nothing to hide. If Obama has a secret, there are various possible new sources of pressure that may fix their threatening gaze upon the HDOH. You’ll doubtlessly be surprised to learn that when I raise the specter of new pressures and threats, I have no need to invoke such kooky elements as Bilderbergs or illuminati or black helicopters or blackmail or pre-arranged plane crashes or CIA issued heart-attack guns. While I lack the knowledge necessary to completely preclude some sort of an enormous cache of clandestine operatives lurking in the shadows to hold the secrets at bay, I can definitely suggest some ideas of far simpler approaches that might have been employed keep the HDOH effectively under a gag order.
I want to clear upfront about the fact that I can only offer vague, speculative theories about whatever pressure has been at work to keep the HDOH actively waging the battle against open disclosure. I only mean to propose some thoughts that I think could plausibly be sufficient to hold Obama in check.
First, consider real threats of civil and/or criminal liability. You see, if there really is a skeleton in Obama’s closet, then suddenly those privacy laws that were all gums when we were thinking of Obama as honest, quickly grow a shiny white set of fearsome teeth when they serve to guard the privacy of unconfessed, potentially damaging information. If the HDOH were to violate its own rules to the slightest degree in a way that might bring unwanted exposure to damaging details, controlling legal authorities would doubtless be pressured to act with a vengeance against the agency and its individual employees. Couple that threat of fines and imprisonment alongside multi-million-dollar civil suits for bringing a major political campaign crashing down through culpable negligence and, viola, you have a frogman-free formula for pressure on HDOH people to hide what they can.
Second, consider that Obama might have found sympathizers within the HDOH. Don’t forget that there’s the strong possibility that the secret information is something that is legally inconsequential but embarrassing to Obama personally. It could even be details about his parentage that would once and for all remove any doubt about Obama’s eligibility. This brings compassion into the equation. Consider that a couple key officers might have felt that it would be an unjust travesty if baseless doubts about Obama’s eligibility were to become the leverage his adversaries need to bring shame upon him and his family before the eyes of a mocking and scornful world. That kind of compassion may at times even overcome a person’s own political bias. Keeping records safe to prevent someone from having to face needless shame and grief surely goes to the core values of many of the individuals charged as gatekeepers for the good of their fellow man. That may sound sarcastic, but I don’t mean it to. It seems very plausible that an unselfish desire to protect Obama from the sadness of laying bare to the world that for example he was born out of wedlock or adopted or born gender-uncertain, etc. may have figured in very tangibly into HDOH’s willingness to jump through all the hurdles it faced.
Allow me to supplement that last point with my view that even if Obama’s secret casts no doubt upon his eligibility, that doesn’t change the fact that his original birth certificate is a reasonable place to to look in order to verify that he is a natural born citizen. Therefore, given that his birth circumstances were being questioned, and given that those doubts were not being answered in the clearest and most openly direct manner, it was inevitable that Obama would be facing a watershed moment. At some point along the way Obama would have to decide whether he needed to just admit the embarrassing truth and apologize for not having mentioned it earlier, OR whether he would be wiser instead to persist in his strategies to keep everyone in the dark even if it meant stretching rules like crazy or cajoling numerous individuals to lie on his behalf, in the hopes that it would never come back to bite him. I am arguing that embarrassment is not an ethically or legally valid excuse for subjecting taxpayers to this lengthy, elaborate series of fraudulent misrepresentations.
Third, let me remind you of statutes that convey record-altering powers upon law enforcement authorities. For example, This is the sort of action that, for example, may sometimes be necessary in witness protections programs. I’ll not bother speculating why Obama in particular might have qualified for such an alteration. I have no idea, but if that had been the case it might have even been pushed to the degree that eventually Obama would be the happy recipient of completely law-enforcement-fabricated, utterly inauthentic original long-form birth certificate. If so, a close review of all the HDOH's sealed files availed to qualified experts would certainly blow the cover off of whatever some law enforcement agency had worked so hard to maintain. As before in my opinion that may be tough luck for Obama, but when it comes to the need of taxpaying, voting citizens to receive open, unclouded, brutally honest answers about the birth circumstances of the occupant of the highest office in the land, witness protections and other such causes simply must give way. Suffice it to say that this is another imaginable factor in why Hawaii might be as inclined as they have been to so fiercely defend the secrets in their possession.
Obama apologists sometimes invoke the principle of Occam’s razor in this way: Obama has described himself to be hawaiian born somewhat consistently since the earliest time he is on record as having said anything about his birthplace. He produced a short form birth certificate from the state of Hawaii that indicated his story was true. Newspaper announcements of his birth also agreed; his Indonesian school record concurred. When push came to shove he managed to persuade Hawaii to make an exception in his case and was then able even to produce a long-form copy of his original birth certificate that fit perfectly the details of the short form and his every prior contention. What, then is the simplest most direct means to account for each of those details? Occam’s razor says simply this: Obama’s birth happened just has he and the long-form pdf say it did.
If I had no idea about numerous related details including the breadth of the hassle suffered by the HDOH for going way out of its way to protect the privacy of a public figure who had abundantly declared that same information in the national media, I would be inclined to agree with you.
Let me suggest that sometimes Occam’s razor is at its sharpest when informed by a more complete picture. Please note that I have not even taken the time here to delve into all the details of the following items:
I need to wrap up this post, and sadly I lack the time to address each of your earlier points one by one, but I at least want to acknowledge one particular argument you raised. I understand you to be saying this: Whether or not everything contained in Obama’s account of his birth is true, a newspaper announcement and a school registration form stand as solid evidence that Obama’s parents had consistently gone on record from the very earliest days with the same story Obama still tells today, so why would I think anything in Hawaii’s records differs meaningfully from that story?
First the provenance of the the newspaper microfilm is extremely dubious.
Second, the school record, if authentic, actually differs a bit from the official story in that it identifies the child as Barry Soetoro even though years later Obama signed and attested that he had never been known by ay other names. As to whether or not Barack regards himself as being a Muslim in those days like the record asserts, I do not know.
Third, consider that Obama had in fact been born in a foreign land or that some other unknown discrepancy was in play, but that the Birth Certificate was generated from testimony declaring him to have been born in Honolulu under the circumstances Obama still officially claims. In this case, as you point out Obama’s actual vital records in Hawaii would roughly corroborate what was in the newspaper and what was on the school record. If all three are in fact in agreement, then what could I hope to gain by having a look at the actual document locked away in its vault? As you know, the answer lies in how the information was recorded. If the birth certificate was compiled through testimony of family members, or was at some point along the way subject to one or more amendments, those details would become evident with a look at the actual “records” (again note Fukino’s odd plural).
Come on. Is it really such a bad idea for me to want a principled, tenacious, duly authorized law enforcement agent to show up on the HDOH’s doorstep with the full force of an all inclusive warrant and the necessary determination to get to the bottom of all this? There’s nothing to be scared of, right?
Whatever you may now say in defense of your position, I can’t help but feel considerable confidence that those who are reading carefully will recognize my argument stands wholly sufficient to establish that there are in this case very reasonable concerns that we have not been told "the whole truth and nothing but the truth” about some element of the birth circumstances, identity and historical background of our sitting president.
As to your question about whether my conclusions are “falsifiable” or if anything could ever convince me otherwise. Don’t forget that my upthread post was focussed on how I’ve essentially run out of hope in any important evidence emerging from the Arpaio/Zullo investigation. If I didn’t say it as a part of that post, I’ll say now that if no evidence emerges over the next few years, I will ultimately be forced to accept that I was probably just wrong about the whole thing. I am neither infallible nor in possession of a miraculously brilliant mind. I have had to admit my mistakes many times in the past, and rest assured, will be willing to do so in this case as well. It may not even take years. I would like to think I could admit I was wrong if someone could only bring to light an ample, innocent explanation that could somehow receive preference from Occam’s razor in terms of how to account for the confluence of all the bizarre and wooly machinations surrounding this case. For now, doing the best I can do, the evidence I can see, however circumstantial it may be, has me thoroughly persuaded that something is not right about Obama’s birth narrative.