Here we go again with more birthers coming out of the woodwork making embarrassments of themselves. CNN's Anderson Cooper spoke to one of them this Monday evening, but here's some background first from Think Progress.
North Carolina Republicans Go Birther: Certificate Is A ‘Poorly Reproduced Forgery’:
North Carolina is apparently ground zero of the latest resurgence of the birther movement, as a number of Republican candidates in the state are expressing doubts about President Obama’s birthplace.
ThinkProgress has previously noted that Richard Hudson, running for a congressional seat in the state’s 8th district, said Obama is “hiding something on his citizenship,” while the Charlotte Observer rescinded its endorsement of Jim Pendergraph, running in the 9th district, after he expressed his own doubts about Obama’s birth certificate.
Now, the Observer reports that Dr. John Whitley, one of Hudson’s opponents in tomorrow’s GOP primary, has also gone birther. He declared Obama’s birth certificate a “poorly reproduced forgery” after comparing it to the Hawaiian birth certificate of one of his campaign workers. “There is a tremendous amount of smoke here,” Whitley said. “In fact, it’s called a smoke screen.”
In the interview above, Anderson Cooper just simply asked Whitley for what proof he had that the birth certificate was a forgery and allowed Whitley to spin himself into looking completely ridiculous. Whitley's proof that the birth certificate was a forgery? Wingnut Sheriff Joe Arpaio's "investigation" that we wrote about here: Arpaio Probe Offers Boilerplate Birtherism in Dramatic Presser.
When asked who any of Arpaio's so-called experts were that he was relying on, Whitley couldn't name them. When asked how he knew his friend's birth certificate was legitimate, his answer was basically that he'd looked at it himself, even though he concurred that he was not an expert on evaluating documents and records.
I really wish these yahoos would get called out for exactly what they're doing in one of these interviews, which is race baiting. Sadly I guess this still goes over well in Republican primaries in North Carolina, since we've got so many of them playing this ugly game. Shameful.
(Note on the video clip above. The CNN broadcast had problems with their video hanging up during a portion of the interview, but the audio continued to work, so it's not a problem with our servers or your computer.)
