Obama's original birth certificate ceased to be an issue for the author of this piece after an Hawaiian state official confirmed as far back as October of 2008 that all of the information on Obama's publicly released COLB (certificate of live birth) short-form was identical to the information contained on the electronically stored long-form derived from the original vital record.
Contrary to what CNN President Jon Klein told the Los Angeles Times in an e-mail, the original vital record was not destroyed in 2001 after its data was transcribed to an electronic format.1 Klein's report prompted Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, to confirm in July of 2009 that the original vital record still existed, that the information on the publicly released COLB short-form was identical to that on the original birth certificate.
Hence, Birthers who demand to see a copy of the original vital record are not asking for proof of Obama's place of birth. They've already made up their minds about that. Instead, they imagine the existence of a vast and complex conspiracy involving state officials. They don't accept the authenticity of the electronic copy. They believe that Dr. Fukino and others are lying. Why would they accept the authenticity of a copy of the original paper document provided by these conspirators? Wouldn't that copy feature the same fraudulent information? Of course!
_________________________1"Hawaii: Obama birth certificate is real", Dan Nakaso (The Honolulu Advertiser), USA Today, July 28, 2009; "It's Certifiable: The last word on President Obama's place of birth", James Taranto, July 30, 2009.
Related Facts
The state of Hawaii did not issue birth certificates to foreign nationals before 1981. Obama was born in 1961.
The rumor that Obama stated in an interview that he had been born at Queen's Hospital in Honolulu is false. The interviewer merely repeated background information from a previous news report. The origin of this error was Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro who in a November 2004 interview with the Rainbow Newsletter stated that Obama had been born at Queens Medical Center in Honolulu. Then in February of 2008, she told a reporter with the Honolulu Star Bulletin that he had been born at the Kap'olani Medical Center for Women and Children. She was wrong the first time and right the second time. Why this sort of common error was such a big deal for some is a question better left to a certified psychologist, for either way, according to Maya Soetoro, Obama was born in America.
This trifle generated a host of new rumors on the Internet. Though most of them are too stupid or insane to bother with, it must be said that a spokesperson for the Kap'olani Medical Center never told a reporter that the facility had no record of Obama being born there. Under current policy, that facility does not confirm or deny such inquiries as a matter of privacy. That's all a spokesperson ever told anyone. In any event, a number of Hawaiian newspapers reported in August of 1961 that Obama was born there. At the time, birth notifications were routinely passed on to newspapers by the Hawaiian Department of Health.
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