But It Doesn't Say Whether He Was Born in a Manger!*

Markos Moulitsas gets a copy (a 2007 facsimile, run off by the state of Hawaii) of Barack Obama's birth certificate, which disproves the rumors I mentioned yesterday… or does it?

Yes, it does.

Obama himself probably has a dog-eared yellowing copy in a desk drawer somewhere; this document is what he or someone authorized by him was given by the state out of its records. Barring some vast conspiracy within the Hawaii State Department of Health, there is no reason to think his birth certificate would have any different data.

So says the guy who retired Dan Rather. What say you, citizens of the comment sections at Hot Air?

Enlarge and the text looks like it has been added on top of the green and white background, rather than typed on it as it would have been in 1961.
…
I find it odd that every work is pixelated around it, yet the black box is not.
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Fathers race "African" (I don't think they used those terms during that time… african is NOT a Legaly defined Race).
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When official docs such as this are copied, the background pattern, exactly like this one, are made to say "Copy" when scanned or copied. This one doesn't have it.
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Looks like a photo shop. The certificate background around the font is fuzzy.

The comments in there are actually about 55/45 sane/insane, and I like Madison Conservative's admonition: "Guys, if you go down this road, it will collapse miserably. This is identical to the Bush National Guard situation, except you're in the position of CBS. It's low politics, and it's a powder keg." That doesn't slow down Charles Johnson at LGF (who, credit due, never believed the stupid "whitey tape" hoax), whose thought process went like this:

It looks genuine. But Moulitsas is definitely not a trustworthy source. I need details on how he got this image before I'll completely believe it.

UPDATE: The campaign did give it to Moulitsas for posting; he says so in the comments.

UPDATE: The interesting aspect of this story to me is that the Obama campaign apparently has close ties to a web site that hosts content like this: (cue nutball Kos commenter's diary about Israel).

What's next week's rumor going to be? I'm guessing an audio tape will reveal that Obama shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. It will be unclear if this was before or after the Nevada caucus.

*I'm stealing one of my preferred jokes from the HotAir pages.

UPDATE: Ho-kay. Charles Johnson fires back at my "smear attack":

Dave Weigel (who fell for the "whitey tape" hoax, then furiously backpedaled)

Nope. My first (June 2) post on the "whitey" story pointed out how risible it was, and how the stories I'd heard about it made no sense.

There's always been something "off" about this rumor. In the year 2008, when videos of Jeremiah Wright sermons and Mitt Romney whoppers were uploaded to YouTube regularly, and with ease, who was still hoarding video tapes? And the rumor has been twisted and mangled as different people have spread it.

In Johnson's eyes, that means I "fell for it." So you know where he's coming from.

he insinuates I was crazy to doubt Markos Moulitsas, and ignores the updates that make it clear I accept the Obama birth certificate as real

I posted two of his updates and left out only Johnson's blockquote of an argument that convinced him, even further, that the document was real. It was clear in his first update that he thought this. I didn't mean to "insinuate he was crazy to doubt" the Kos-ter in Chief; I just found it amusing that he theorized that Moulitsas committed fraud or was getting "leaks" from Team Obama, before discovering the delivery from Team Obama was above-board and described by Moulitsas in the link. Once he verified that, he moved lickety-split to his usual "Daily Kos is a pit of snakes and bigots and anyone who communicates with Moulitsas is suspect" line.

Weigel uses commenters to bash Hot Air and LGF

I quoted no LGF commenters. In the past I've linked to LGF threads and comments, but I've never attributed them to Johnson. Johnson wants the people who link him to treat him with a different standard than he applies to the BarackObama.com webmasters, which is fine: He's not running for president. Also I credited the majority of Hot Air commenters for not going the tinfoil hat route. (The really funny thing is that the commenters at both sites refuse to believe the "no, it's a real document" explanation offered by the webmasters.)

[he] excuses the sheer insanity posted in a Daily Kos diary by discounting it as a "comment" — which it is not

He quotes me in his own post calling the nutty anti-Israel stuff "a commenter's diary." Not a "comment." Why? I don't refer to blog "diarists" on first reference, because not every blog has them. Daily Kos (unlike LGF or this site) allows members (would that have been a better word than "commenter?") to post one diary a day, and Johnson linked to this thing by "nepos libertas," which was posted one month ago. (The diarist included a poll, in which all but 4 percent of readers called him an anti-Semite or idiot.)

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by this, as Johnson was one of the bloggers who bought the "the Terri Schiavo Senate memo is a fake!" conspiracy theory in 2005. It took him two weeks to call it "the Memogate II scandal that wasn't."