Remember when it seemed as if even Donald Trump believed the Obama birth certificate issue had been laid to rest? Well, forget it -- World Net Daily tells us today that Trump's a birther again:
Billionaire businessman Donald Trump ... says he believes the "birth certificate" released by the White House is forged.
His comments came yesterday in a telephone call to WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi, Ph.D., who is appearing on wall-to-wall radio programs -- between 10 and 20 per day -- to respond to questions about his latest best-seller, "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama is Not Eligible to be President."
... Trump said his period of almost-complete silence on the issue following the release by the White House on April 27 of the image of a "Certificate of Live Birth" from the state of Hawaii was not because he was satisfied with the document.
"I always said I wanted to know if it was real," Trump told Corsi....
By astonishing coincidence, this happened a day after the official announcement of Trump's own wingnut-friendly book on politics. I see two possible explanations for this: either Trump cut a series of deals with Corsi and WND Books (to promote Corsi's book) and Regnery (which will publish Trump's book) and now can't get out of the deals ... or he thinks right-wing crazies are a lucrative market niche, and he still wants a piece of the action.
Trump knows that far-right books can really sell -- often via bulk buys, but maybe he doesn't care. Maybe he just wants to get back on the book charts. He's published a lot of books in recent years (or at least his name appears as the author or co-author of a lot of books) -- but the only New York Times bestseller he's had in the past five years is Think Like a Champion, which spent a whopping two weeks on the Times's Advice, How-To, and Miscellaneous list.
Corsi's book, by contrast, hit #6 on the newly released Times list, which will appear on the Times Web site this weekend. The Times says bulk buys were involved. But still: #6. That's better than Trump's done in years.
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The WND article linked includes a long, tedious summary of all the "evidence" various birthers have amassed regarding the newly released birth certificate. We're told it's a doctored PDF by one Ira Zatkovich, who, it turns out, is a professional expert witness -- that's the heading on his Web site: "Ivan Zatkovich -- Expert Witness." Now, my reaction when an expert witness tells me something is a fact is about what my reaction would be if a prostitute said I was great in bed -- I'd be a tad suspicious, for precisely the same reasons.
I won't run through all the "evidence," but I particularly enjoy the work of one Karl Denninger, who discusses the birth certificate in terms of -- yes -- kerning:
... Karl Denninger, the former of CEO of MCSNet, a Chicago networking and Internet company, said the presence of "kerning" in the text confirms manipulation....
Denninger explains that in the image above, of the name of the hospital, the "a" and the "p" share vertical space on the line.
"This process, of course, requires that you know what the next letter is. With a computer this is pretty easy, since the computer can retroactively go back and adjust, and it also can typeset the current letter with the knowledge of what the previous one was," he reported. "A typewriter, on the other hand, is a mechanical device. It does not know what the next letter is that you will type, nor does it know what the last letter was that you typed. It thus has a typeface that always leaves physical space between the boundary of each character."
Has this guy ever even used a typewriter? Especially one that's been in service for a while and has become older and creakier? I just searched for "typescript" at Google Image Search and immediately got a page with facsimiles of typed pages from the "Time Passes" section of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, at Woolf Online. Page 5 is here. I'll show you an excerpt (click to enlarge):
Under the "III," do you see the "n" and "e" crashing together in "one"? Or, on the last line, the "ng" crashes in "sings" and "turning"?
Denninger says of the Obama birth certificate:
"To refute this point you must come up with a typewriter that contains a flux capacitor and thus is capable of accurately predicting the future," he said. "This document has been assembled by somebody on a computer."
Omigod! Someone gave Virginia Woolf a flux capacitor! When she typed an "n," her typewriter could predict the future!
These are Trump's pals -- again. Or still.
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