National Review lies in anti-Birther editorial ("Born in the U.S.A.")

National Review offers the editorial "Born in the U.S.A." (peekURL.com/zkdwktb) about the Obama citizenship issue. Not only are they aping the title of a deceptive FactCheck page about this issue [1], and not only are they using similar statements to those used by FactCheck, but they're lying almost as badly as FactCheck does. I'll only discuss this part:

The Hawaiian birth certificate President Obama has produced - the document is formally known as a "certificate of live birth" - bears that information. It has been inspected by reporters, and several state officials have confirmed that the information in permanent state records is identical to that on the president’s birth certificate - which is precisely what one expects, of course, since the state records are used to generate those documents when they are requested. In other words, what President Obama has produced is the “real” birth certificate of myth and lore. The director of Hawaii’s health department and the registrar of records each has personally verified that the information on Obama’s birth certificate is identical to that in the state’s records, the so-called vault copy.

The article's post time is currently given as July 28, 2009 4:00 AM, presumably Eastern. Some time that appears to be around 9pm Eastern of the day before, Chiyome Fukino issued her new statement. It's my strong hunch that this editorial was written before that time, but - just to be extra generous - I'm going to assume that the editorial was edited after that time and reflects the National Review's current idea of the truth. Despite that, they're still lying:

1. The statement "several state officials have confirmed that the information in permanent state records is identical to that on the president’s birth certificate" is false. No Hawaiian official has ever said that. Read the actual statements from October 2008 and yesterday, and compare that to the National Review's lie. In neither statement do they say anything about the picture on Obama's site. Further, aside from a statement from Janice Okubo that she won't confirm, no other statements from the Hawaiian government confirmed anything relating to this issue. The last sentence in the National Review's quote is false for the same reasons. Those aren't just minor points: if NRO doesn't even understand what those earlier statement actually contain but is instead going off distorted Associated Press summaries, can their opinion be trusted?

2. The document has not been inspected "by reporters". The only people outside the Obama camp who claim to have seen a paper copy are FactCheck. As discussed at that link, they aren't exactly a credible source. They also aren't document experts, nor did they call in document experts. Per their page [1], those who they claim saw the document were their "representatives" and "staffers", not reporters. And, their pictures were later silently recompressed and edited to remove camera data that had a date months earlier than the pictures were supposedly taken.

3. National Reviews wants to deal with this "formally", but they can't even read what it says on the picture on Obama's site. The document in question isn't a "certificate of live birth" as they state, it's a "certification of live birth". To some that might be a small difference, but when dealing with legal issues seemingly minor issues can be very major. I recently updated a few posts in which I'd made the same error because I care about getting things right. Obviously, the National Review does not.

Also: in comments on an earlier post, Smitty says that NRO has added things to this editorial; if anyone can do a diff please leave a comment on this post.

Please send brief, polite emails that focus only on the lies discussed above or other lies in the editorial to one or more of the following: letters *at* nationalreview.com, JonahNRO *at* gmail.com, klopez *at* nationalreview.com, amccarthy *at* nationalreview.com, author *at* victorhanson.com, hemingway *at* nationalreview.com, comments.kurtz *at* nationalreview.com

UPDATE: I had the links for the press releases reversed, now corrected. Also, the links with the red "S" after them are links to "summary pages" that contain a list of our coverage of that specific person, group, or topic. Some of those include a summary at the top; others are simply lists of links to posts. Hovering the mouse over a link with a red "S" should bring up a window containing the first part of the summary or at least the number of posts about that topic.

UPDATE 2: I sent emails to the first five NRO writers listed above shortly after post time and then another today just to KLo asking if they wanted to say anything. I didn't receive any responses. Another email address that I should add is NRO's new editor, Rich Lowry: comments.lowry *at* nationalreview.com

Also, this page unfortunately engages in ad homs and I haven't read the whole thing but it might have some interesting information on the editorial and on FactCheck.

UPDATE 3: Andrew McCarthy posts "Suborned in the U.S.A./The birth-certificate controversy is about Obama’s honesty, not where he was born" (link) in which he points out some problems with the editorial.

[1] factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html

Tue, 07/28/2009 - 20:45 · Importance: 8