Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Conspiracy Flashback: Tulsa Blogger Bates Played the Birther Game Too

Speaking of "Birtherism" in T-town (see last post), Tulsa blogger Michael Bates of Batesline fame couldn't resist getting in on the action back in April.

As you will recall, that's when the president released his (supposedly non-existent) long-form birth certificate. Ah, but the conspiracy theorists immediately seized on the supposed inconsistencies in the document to assert that the certificate was a forgery.

Of course! Every conspiracy theorist worth his or her salt is going to find glaring problems in this obvious forgery from the highest office in the land. 

Unfortunately, Bates played along with this nonsense. Here's what he wrote on April 27, 2011:
My guess was that there was something embarrassing on the long-form birth certificate that didn't appear on the certification of live birth that he released earlier. [Actually, no. Bates was wrong.]

And now the White House has posted on its website a PDF containing what purports to be a scan of a certified copy of the birth certificate of Barack Hussein Obama, II.

I say "purports" because there are some weird things about it. It's not strange that it's a PDF, rather than an image file, like a JPEG, BMP, PNG, or TIFF. Many scanners generate a PDF by default.
Bates went on to cite more document mumbo-jumbo from his network of highly sophisticated [sic] wingnuts, but…it all amounted to a molehill, not a mountain. They have no conspiracy and found no forgery. But last April, Bates played along as if this was a real controversy.

As we said in our last post, only the loneliest and most unhinged (read: Orly Taitz) are still playing the "birther" card.

1 comment:

Tulsan said...

Despite being an intelligent individual, Bates is very much a go-with-the-herd right-wing tool. Who knows if he believes this nonsense or is a mere transponder, hoping to advance in the GOP media food chain.