Lee's Blog

I really wish the birthers would just shut up. Every interesting comment thread on political sites gets interrupted by some birther referring to the Usurper, the Kenyan-in-Chief, or the like. It gets really annoying.

It’s true, the President has not produced his original birth certificate, and it’s possible that he can’t. Big deal. Neither can I. All those records were computerized over the years, and who knows what became of the originals? They may have been destroyed. They may be sitting in some “Raiders of the Lost Ark” warehouse somewhere being eaten by rats and silverfish. Who knows?

And anyway, let’s suppose that the President of the United States made a personal appeal to the Hawaiian government to find his birth certificate, and they actually did. Would the birthers accept it? Of course not. They’d be demanding proof that it’s the real thing and not a forgery. And how do you prove that? It is sometimes possible to prove conclusively that something is a forgery — like the TANG memos — and still there may be people who deny it is forged.

You can’t prove a negative beyond any conceivable doubt; you can’t prove that this document is not a forgery. The best you can do is produce credible people who will give their expert opinion that the document is not detectably forged according to the following tests, blah blah blah. Who are the birthers going to consider credible? It’s a safe bet that anyone who says the document is not forged will be, ipso facto, not credible in their eyes.

Let’s say, though, that you somehow managed to convince some birthers that the birth certificate is authentic. Their next fall-back, I can say with assurance, is to demand proof that the person in the White House actually is the baby whose birth was reported. I mean, that baby might have died, and this person might have taken his identity.

Can you prove that is not the case? Oh, sure, the birth certificate may have a footprint on it (or it may not, I don’t know how common that was), and perhaps the claim is that the President’s footprint has whorls and loops that match, but then you have yet more fights over the authenticity of the President’s footprint (was there a little sleight of hand whereby the real footprint was switched for a matching fake?), the authenticity of the footprint on the birth certificate (was that altered?), and whether it is or is not possible to change a footprint via plastic surgery.

The birthers’ position is unassailable. That doesn’t mean it’s right; Last Thursdayism is unassailable too. But I’d get awfully annoyed if every scientific discussion were interrupted by a spiel for Last Thursdayism.

Birthers need to face it: not one of us can prove beyond any conceivable doubt that we are who we say we are. The President has produced more evidence of his birth in the United States than I had to produce to get a passport (I produced a computer-generated certificate of live birth, but I didn’t produce a newspaper announcement), and it is unreasonable to keep demanding more.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 4th, 2010 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.