Saturday, March 06, 2010

Birther Boo-Boo: Farah Falls for False Fact

Not content to lay low after accusing Newsweek of falsely calling him a Birther, Joseph "Mr. Mustache" Farah - grand poobah of World Net Daily - has informed us that those wacky people in Hawai'i have changed their story, yet again, as to why the President has the COLB that he does.

The United Kingdom's Sky News reported Saturday: "Authorities in Hawaii have provided an electronic record of Obama's birth because the paper copy was destroyed in a fire which wiped out much of the state's archives."

Which is it?

Does Hawaii actually have an original long-form, paper birth certificate for Obama, or was it destroyed in a fire?

It seems the story is ever-changing.


The rest of the article is Mr. Farah covering old ground, capped of by his pontificating that this is yet another reason for President Obama to "come clean," and "settle the controversy" by releasing a birth certificate that Mr. Farah can agree is genuine - warning that it may take a "public uprising" to make him comply.

But Mr. Farah really should have dug around before printing this. If he had, he'd have learned that there is no record of there having been a fire at Hawai'i's state records. NONE.

Where did Sky News get this "fact?" That's a good question - one most likely solved by our friends at Oh For Goodness Sake, who looked into the matter and found a spoof site was most likely to blame.

Obama, who claims that he was born in Honolulu in 1961, has now claimed that a hospital fire that occurred during the 1941 bombing destroyed his birth certificate.

...

"If you must blame someone for my not locating my birth certificate, blame Yokomoto and Tojo and Hirohito and the Japanese fleet that bombed Pearl Harbor. It's all their fault."


Why would someone from Sky News print this as a fact? That is unknown at this time. It's possible the author was punked. It's also possible that the usual game of "telephone" that makes up so much of the internet has done its usual magic.

But the really delicious thing here is that, after schooling Andrew "Disco Baby" Breitbart about the "fundamental tenets" of journalism, Mr. Farah has seemingly broken one of the most important. He has clearly not checked his sources' veracity to make certain that he's actually reporting on something real, rather than something incredible someone heard but can't really confirm.

Namely, hearsay.

Not that I'd ever accuse a Birther of giving two pulls on a dead dog's cock* about the truth or facts, anyway. But it's somewhat sad to see Mr. Farah make such a crass mistake while crusading after the "truth" he thinks will set us all free.

We will just have to see if and when he prints a retraction.


* Thank you Spider Jerusalem.

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