Latest Birth Certificate Won’t Satisfy Obama’s Idiot Critics
The White House today released the long-form facsimile of President Obama’s birth certificate (see image below), issued by the Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital on the island of Oahu in Hawaii on the day he was born, August 4, 1961.
The Safest Prediction I’ve Ever Made: This won’t satisfy his “birther” critics, whom I have chosen to refer to in my headline as “idiots,” but who are actually better understood as “motivated reasoners,” the term used by science now to explain the process whereby we all — some more successfully than others — resist facts that contradict our entrenched beliefs and prejudices. See Chris Mooney’s excellent article on this subject in the latest Mother Jones: “The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science” (hat tip to Anna Haynes).
We can only speculate about the motivation of the motivated-reasoning birthers, since they now span the spectrum from mother of the birther movement Orly Taitz to the birther opportunist and fake presidential candidate Donald Trump.
But it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to suggest that many of them are racists and bigots who simply cannot abide the very idea of a black man having the temerity to be President of the United States.
If you have any doubt about how relentlessly such critics will resist facts, just click on the image below and see the comments already posted to the White House website about this new evidence (see an example of such a comment below the following image):
Perfect example of the “motivated-reasoning” of a skeptical commenter:
“jeepix 7 minutes ago
I blew this up to it’s full size and there’s white around most of the letters in the form as well as white around the hand-written letters and numbers. If this was scanned, the green pattern in the background would come through to show it was not ’altered’. Also, what’s with the cut area on the left? How it appears ’pasted’ into the green pattern? This looks odd to me. If it existed all the time, why did the governor of Hawaii say there was nothing on file?”