Andrew Sullivan lies, misleads, smears: Hawaii never "vouched for" the COLB pictured on Obama's site

Andrew Sullivan offers "Obama still isn’t president in the south/Denying the leader’s American birth is just another form of racism" (link). There are other smears besides those in the title, but I'll leave looking at those to the reader. Instead, I'll just concentrate on how he's lying and misleading about this issue:

There are notices in two local papers and the certification of birth is filed in the state of Hawaii’s records.

The announcements didn't list where or in what hospital he was born and no one has proved that they could have only come from a birth hospital and would only indicate a birth in Hawaii. No one knows who placed those announcements; it could even have been the grandparents in case of a custody battle or simply to prove U.S. citizenship. That doesn't mean they planted the announcements, it just means that's a possibility.

Once I’d seen the short-form certificate online, verified by independent journalists and vouched for by state authorities, I was, too.

State authorities have never "vouched for" the picture shown on Obama's site or on FactCheck, as a Hawaii state spokeswoman points out at the link.

The only people outside the Obama camp who we know have seen the cert are from FactCheck, and those from their group who saw it were their (per them) "representatives" and "staffers", not "independent journalists" as Sullivan states. Further, FactCheck is not a credible organization; in fact, their main page about this issue outrageously lied to their visitors for over eight months.

Some, like me, didn’t understand the Hawaiian intricacies at first: we thought there was a single long-form certificate that could resolve the question. But, as FactCheck notes: “The Hawaii Department of Health’s birth record request form does not give the option to request a photocopy of your long-form birth certificate, but their short form has enough information to be acceptable to the State Department.” So Obama did all he could to make this go away.

Obama hasn't done all he could "to make this go away". If you look at the legal requests that were made of him, they included things like his school records and the like (see a list from one case here). He could have released a non-onerous subset of those type of records and, since Hawaii still has his original paperwork on file, he could have them release that if he wanted to. It's ludicrous that those who aren't cult members would take a picture on a web page as proof of citizenship.

I left a variant of the above as a comment on the article, and if the Times UK doesn't print a correction please send them emails asking them to do so.

UPDATE: A full day after I posted a comment on the article, the Times still hasn't approved it. Please send this link to online.editor *at* timesonline.co.uk

Sun, 08/09/2009 - 13:25 · · Importance: 4