Sh-h-h-h!

During this heated presidential election season, at least one issue enjoys almost universal bipartisan agreement: There must be no public discussion of President Obama’s birth certificate (or lack thereof).

Democrats, Republicans, media people — virtually no major nationally-known public figure is willing to talk about whether the President really is a “natural born” American citizen.

I have been, and remain, an agnostic on the issue. The only thing I can say for certain is that the online documents presented so far by the Obama team are obvious fakes. Although I am an amateur in the field, my years of work with digital images have made it easy to determine that the two certificates released by Obama’s people have been digitally manipulated, if not fabricated from scratch.

What has always been more significant, however, is the cone of silence that descended on the eligibility issue four years ago and has remained in place ever since. All national discussion of the issue was shut down early, and shut down completely.

If you believe the rumors circulating among low-level media people, famous talk-show hosts and TV talking heads have been threatened into silence concerning the birth certificate. The truth is hard to determine, but both the rumors and the silence persist.

Diana West is one of the rare courageous exceptions among national commentators in her willingness to examine “birther” topics. Her post today concerns the near-unanimous silence on the issue, particularly among American conservatives.


Disowning Birth Certificates, Disowning Truth
by Diana West

Below is this week’s syndicated column: “Is Obama Disowning His Online Birth Certificate?” It takes in the shifting strategy of the Obama defense team in fending off challenges to Obama’s eligibility to appear on presidential primary ballots. Obama’s eligibility is a signal concern for the nation which should be the subject of informed, serious debate on the front pages, on news shows, and also, most important, in the Congress. Such debate is non-existent. Such concern is non-existent, too. It doesn’t seem to matter to the citizenry that a fraudster may be completing one term in the White House while seeking another.

I recently had the occasion to discuss the matter with a very famous American conservative.

Famous Conservative said to me: Tell me what columns of yours are getting a big response lately.

I had earlier written this column about the Georgia ballot challenge hearing in which President Obama ignored a subpoena for the certified copy of his birth certificate (among other documents). This column elicited a great response from readers, many of whom asked me the same question: why this important story wasn’t being covered in the media.

They’re really interested in this whole eligibility story, I said.

Famous Conservative: I’ll bet they are.

Me: Aren’t you?

FC: No.

Me: No? Why aren’t you?

FC: If this were happening back at the time of the election, maybe.

I told FC this is an election (ding-dong).

FC: Exactly. But this will alienate the people we need to defeat him at the polls.

I made some naïve-sounding comment (which I thoroughly subscribe to) about the seeking the truth regardless of the outcome, adding that the truth would likely alienate plenty of people from Obama, too.

Impasse.

New tack for Famous Conservative: If this were true, why hasn’t Rush or Hannity taken it on?

Me: They’re afraid.

FC: (Scoffs.)

Me: Look, Rush won’t talk about a lot of things: Islamization, for one. Sharia. Muslim Brotherhood, those kinds of things. He has a comfort zone.

FC: (Disbelief.)

Impasse.

FC: Well, maybe if some respected conservative journalist were to examine the story —

Me: (What am I, chopped liver?) Who, for instance?

FC: John Fund, Daniel Henniger …

Hey boys, have at it. But there’s a problem. According to the FC

(1)		the truth will alienate voters so we mustn’t seek the truth; and
(2)		it can’t be true anyway because otherwise Rush, Sean, John and Dan would be all over the story.

Of course, if FC’s conservative journalists subscribe to #1 or some variation thereon as partisans or Republicans, we’ll never get to #2. Meanwhile, across the journalistic aisle, the MSM has the another, equally heavy stake in preventing the truth from outing. They want Obama re-elected.

What’s wrong with this picture? Conservative logic, conservative morality.

Needless to say, I didn’t make any inroads with FC although FC’s spouse shares my concern in the subject, so that’s something.

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The column:

Almost exactly one year ago — with Donald Trump on top of presidential polls and author Jerome Corsi on top of Amazon’s best-seller list, both for asking where President Barack Obama’s “real” birth certificate was — Judith Corley, the president’s personal attorney, flew to Hawaii. She went there to pick up two certified copies of the president’s long-form birth certificate from the Hawaii Department of Health.

At least, that’s what then-White House Counsel Robert Bauer told us last April 27 at a White House press briefing called to unveil the new, certified document. Multiple copies were passed out to the press, while NBC’s Savannah Guthrie became the one witness I know of to touch the certified document. (She reported she “felt the raised seal.”) A computer image of this Obama long-form birth certificate appeared on the White House website, where now you and I can download it for ourselves as proof of the president’s bona fides.

Or is it?

It is this same Internet image that the Cold Case Posse, a group of lawyers and former law enforcement professionals assembled by Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio to vet Obama’s identity documents, has concluded is most likely a forgery. At its March 1 press conference, the posse further explained that it believed the online image originated as a computer file. In other words, a paper document did not exist before the image appeared on the White House website.

If the posse’s mind-blowing findings are correct, what is it that Judith Corley couriered back to Washington? And what is it that Savannah Guthrie touched?

I find such questions most intriguing — even if the rest of the media do not — particularly after last week’s court hearing into Obama’s eligibility to appear on the ballot in the New Jersey presidential primary. After literally dozens of such eligibility cases since 2008 (evidently, the media are waiting for a discernible story trend to emerge before they pounce), I can report, having watched a video of the New Jersey hearing online, that the president’s team is making progress. Only now it’s away from his long-form birth certificate.

The curious fact is, President Obama’s attorney, Alexandra Hill, couldn’t have been more adamant about not citing the online birth certificate as a means of proving the president’s identity in this recent challenge — and after everyone went to so much trouble to get it! Indeed, she called the Internet image “legally irrelevant,” arguing that New Jersey law doesn’t specifically call for a birth certificate to qualify a presidential candidate for the ballot.

Exactly how a presidential candidate demonstrates he is at least 35 years old and “natural born,” the constitutional requirement New Jersey upholds, Hill didn’t say, but Administrative Law Judge Jeff Masin found her arguments persuasive to the point of preventing an expert witness from offering testimony that the online image is a forgery.

Even though the Obama team entered no documentation of the president’s identity into the record — not even that “certified” birth document Obama’s personal lawyer traveled so far to retrieve — Judge Masin managed to find that the president was both born in Hawaii and “natural born.”

Neat, huh? But note the shift in legal tactics. If, in New Jersey, the online birth certificate was “legally irrelevant,” in January’s Georgia eligibility hearing, the president’s lawyer, Michael Jablonski, considered it legally decisive. Jablonski cited “the documents evidencing the birth of President Obama” that are available online to try to quash a subpoena that “commanded” Obama to come to court and bring “any and all birth records” with him (among other documents).

A golden opportunity to show off that certified, hand-couriered birth doc from Hawaii, and be done with it, no? No. When Administrative Law Judge Michael Malihi refused to quash the subpoena, Jablonski and Obama ignored it. They just didn’t show up. Not to worry: Flouted subpoena and all, and without any evidence from the Obama team, Judge Malihi found that the president was both born in Hawaii and “natural born,” too.

Amazing how that works, and no matter what the president’s lawyers do — so long as they don’t enter tangible evidence of the president’s identity into the court record.

As for that new birth certificate that came online last April? Since government and media have abdicated their responsibility to help determine whether it’s the real McCoy or a forgery, what else is there to do but wish it a happy first birthday?