Jay McKinnon, a self-described Department of Homeland Security-trained document specialist, has implicated himself in the production of palpably fake Hawaii birth certificate images similar to the one endorsed as genuine by the Barack Obama campaign, and appearing on the same Daily Kos blog entry where the supposedly authentic document appears.
The evidence of manipulation of images of official documents, triggered by Israel Insider's revelation of the collection of Hawaii birth certificate images on the Photobucket site and the diligent detective work of independent investigative journalists in the three weeks since the publication of the images, implicate The Daily Kos, a "progressive" blog site, and the Obama campaign's "Fight the Smears" website, in misleading the public with official-looking but manipulated document images of doubtful provenance. Moreover, the blog and the campaign have been negligent in allowing the promotion of obviously fake official documents together with the purported image of Obama's birth certificate.
ORIGINS OF THE SUSPECT IMAGE ON DAILY KOS
The blog entry, posted by the site founder Kos (Markos Moulitsas), is presented as a response to a request by Jim Geraghty of the National Review Online, who had, three days before, called for the Obama campaign to release the candidate's birth certificate:
Having done some Obama-rumor debunking that got praise from Daily Kos (a sign of the apocalypse, no doubt), perhaps the Obama campaign could return the favor and help debunk a bunch of others with a simple step: Could they release a copy of his birth certificate?
Reporters have asked for it and been denied, and the state of Hawaii does not make such records public [...]
So Kos aka Moulitsas goes out and gets one. One impressed commenter on the site asks Kos where he got it. He answers:
"I asked the campaign. This 'journamalism [sic] thing actually works sometimes."
But why would a presidential campaign that has its own "Fight the Smears" website rely on a radical left-wing blog like Daily Kos to post its official documents, especially one as sensitive and controversial as a birth certificate? A few days later the Obama site would post a very low resolution, barely legible image -- it still is there on the site, with no reference to the one first posted at the Daily Kos.
Yet the service of Daily Kos to the Obama campaign raises some questions: Who in the campaign would be authorized to release a personal document of Barack Obama's birth certificate? Was it a paper document that they sent to Kos to scan, or did the Obama campaign scan the original and send it to Kos? If so, why not just post it on the Fight the Smears site? Or is there another possible source for the document? There is no documentation of the provenance of this image, from whom and why it was transmitted to Daily Kos, and in which format. None, that is, except for the say-so of Markos Moulitsas, who said he simply asked the Obama campaign for it.
The perceived unreliability of the image has provoked petitions and widespread demands for Obama to submit for objective inspection the paper versions of the "birth certificate" he claimed in his book Dreams from My Father was in his possession, as well as the paper version of the Certificate of Live Birth for which the image on the Daily Kos and the Obama "Fight the Smears" website was supposedly generated.
Without a valid birth certificate, the primary record of US birth, Obama cannot prove that he fulfills the "natural born citizen" requirement of the Constitution, throwing into doubt his eligibility to run for President and throwing the race into turmoil. His presumed Kenyan-born father was foreign-born, and his mother was too young at the time of birth to confer natural born status by virtue of her American citizenship. Thus his citizenship comes down to proving he was born in the USA, |