Believe it or not, "birthers" are still around.
Yes, we're still dealing with crazies who think every major and most minor news organizations are part of a grand conspiracy to cover up the President of the United States not being eligible for the office.
Joe Arpaio, the sherrif of Maricopa county is back in the news saying he has found proof that Obama is not an American citizen. Of course, Arpaio has lost all credibility because of his unconstitutional prison conditions, refusal to cooperate with the Department of Justice and recent acts of racial profiling.
You should remember the beginnings of the "birther" movement from the last presidential campaign.
It began with a small group of Hillary Clinton supporters. Around the time Hillary's campaign started to be the clear loser, anonymous Clintonites distributed chain emails questioning Obama's citizenship.
In the wake of this controversy, Jim Geraghty of the widely-known conservative magazine and website the National Review called for Obama to release his birth certificate. Geraghty said that if Obama didn't want people to think that he was hiding anything, then he should share his certificate with the nation.
Three days later, the Obama campaign posted a short-form birth certificate on the website for Fight the Smears.
That document was the one provided by Hawaii and yet somehow critics immediately said it wasn't good enough because it wasn't the "long-form' certificate.
The state of Hawaii explained it had swapped to electronic records in 2001 and didn't issue long-forms anymore, but that it could find Obama's in the state's records house. They did, and the certificate has since been handled and seen by many experts, none of whom have questioned it.
Every medical, governmental and judiciary expert who has seen the document has not had a problem with it.
Of course this didn't stop the birthers, who are obviously smarter than those of us who don't think the world is out to get us and don't buy into raw conspiracy theories.
They claimed it was a digital forgery through Photoshop and didn't have a raised state seal. Jerome Corsi even wrote a book about how Obama's campaign was setting up conspiracy after conspiracy to lie to the American public. He said on Fox News that "it's been shown to have watermarks from Photoshop. It's a fake document."
Alabama Republicans certainly couldn't let the opportunity to rile up their base pass them by, and in 2009, the Cullman Times reported Senator Richard Shelby was holding a town hall meeting and was asked if Obama was a natural- born citizen. Shelby said, "Well his father was Kenyan, and they said he was born in Hawaii, but I haven't seen any birth certificate."
Once again, numerous people familiar with grandiose forgeries, Photoshop and Hawaiian officials said it was in fact a legitimate legal document. FactCheck.org dealt with the original papers and has posted lengthy explanations on their website of how it cannot be a fake.
Birthers, apparently the most stubborn people in America, still wouldn't relent.
In 2011, Obama, along with the state of Hawaii, released his long-form birth certificate and once again thought the matter settled.
Of course, it wasn't, and the Drudge Report started rerunning the claim that it was a forgery made with Photoshop. Nathan Goulding, chief technology officer of the conservative National Review magazine, said the argument that there are layered components in the White House's PDF by suggesting that "whoever scanned the birth certificate in Hawaii forgot to turn off the OCR setting on the scanner."
He went further and said, "I've confirmed that scanning an image, converting it to a PDF, optimizing that PDF, and then opening it up in Illustrator does, in fact, create layers similar to what is seen in the birth certificate PDF. You can try it yourself at home."
By the spring of 2012, a few states still weren't convinced, and as they were preparing their ballots for election season, Arizona and Mississippi asked Hawaii for verification that Obama was born there.
It was provided.
Now, this is not to say being in the minority makes you wrong. I also don't believe in backing down from your beliefs easily.
But, please, how about before we buy into something and claim it as a fact, especially as grand a theory as this, do some research?
When the people who don't do any research end up in the spotlight, like the birthers and their 15 minutes of fame, their stupidity shines like sun.
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