There is no 12 step program for Birthers

Within hours of the release of President Obama's long form birth certificate the right wing blogosphere was buzzing with a new theory, that the certificate was forged. The proof, offered by an Atlanta based art director was that the image, in PDF (Adobe Photoshop File format) In Photoshop, an image will normally be created in layers so a change in one layer can be made without affecting the other layers. When the image is done, the layers are 'flattened; into one layer.

Nixon argued that the PDF file could be broken down into one layer of the background and another of the text, something that couldn't be done with a document scanned into a PDF format. In reality a file scanned into a PDF format will read text as an image rather than as text. OCR (Optical character recognition) can read the images of the text and will then separate them into a separate 'layer'. This is how one can separate text from images in a PDF file by creating a separate text (word processing) layer.

This didn't seem to deter most birthers. Orly Taizt, the queen of birthers claimed that it must be a forgery because Obama's father was described as 'African' and not 'Negro'. Obama's father was a Kenyan. Africans comr from Africa and Kenya is still in Africa according to mot maps. Taitz was one of the idiots who were suckered into believing a faked Kenyan birth certificate that first appeared on Ebay and hey, if it's on Ebay it has to be true. Taitz seems determined to prove thst every 'blonde' joke is not really a joke but a statement of fact.

Within hours Drudge had the alleged forgery as the main headline. The saner conservative journal NRO (National Review Onine) took a copy of the cover of their latest issue to show how a PDF version could show alleged 'layers' by using OCR software.

Then there is the claim that because Obama's father was not a U.S. citizen he would be ineligible evn if he was born in Hawaii. If that were the case, six previous Presidents including Thomas Jefferson who had at least one non-citizen parent would have also been disqualified.

Others argue that Obama automatically renounced his American citizenship when he lived in Indonesia. That would surprise millions of Americans who currently live outside teh U.S.

Nothing will deter these people. Expect a whole new slew of even nuttier theories. One of the biggest right wing websites, WorldNetDaily cited an extract from the book "The Manchurian President: Barack Obama's Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists," to prove Obama isn't eligible to be President. Enough said on that one.

I'm sure James O'Keefe, famed video splicer (Acorn etc) is no doubt already creating a video to 'prove' an even whacker alternative.

The author of the parody blog, Sarah Proud and Tall has her own she witnessed on a plane out of Nairobi around the time Obama was allegedly born in Hawaii. Spoiler alert: it involves alien lizard like creatures. Odds are some wingnut idiot will present it as evidence before the weekend is done.