I might as well throw in my two cents.
First off, previous experience with Danae has told me that she's not above making crap up. I direct your attention to
this FR exchange we had last month, beginning with this post of mine:
Quote:
LorenC to Danae
Back to Hawaii... when the islands became a state what was going on? Vietnam. The state was getting a very large number of refugees, and immigrants. It was the Ellis Island of the Pacific. Hawaii did not have the resources to deal with this. I am sure they used many avenues towards gaining revenues from the Federal Government to handle it. One of the things they did was to make it very easy to register births of babies. You could register ‘late’ a birth for up to a year. All you needed was a ‘witness’ signature. Lots and lots of those babies were NOT born in Hawaii or anywhere else in the United States.
Hawaii literally gave Hawaiian birth documents, Certificates of Live Birth, to thousands of babies over more than a decade this way.
Considering that this is more or less the crux of the argument you made above...do you have any actual sourced evidence to substantiate ANY of these claims you're making?
That Hawaii was the recipient of an exceedingly large number of Vietnamese immigrants?
That Hawaii's resources were taxed by the influx of immigration during the period?
That Hawaii was granting Certificates of Live Birth to "thousands" of babies based on nothing more than a witness signature?
That Hawaii was giving out fraudulent birth certificates to lots and lots of foreign-born babies?
Can you actually provide sources for any of these claims you're treating as established fact, or are you just making crap up as you go along?
That's multiple made-up assertions, presented as fact,
in a single post. Subsequent posts mostly involved her evading most of these issues, citing population stats from the 1980s forward, and telling me to prove HER wrong. Like oh-so-many other Birthers, Danae is definitely ready and willing to be a BS artist to further the Birther cause.
But I believe there's a difference between making up and repeating bad information and manufacturing fake physical evidence. It's the difference between being a BS artist and an outright con-artist. Think back over the last two years, and while we've seen innumerable false claims from Birthers, we've seen very few efforts to actually fake evidence to support their claims. Lucas Smith is obviously the most notable, and he was most likely drawn by financial incentives. Polarik's kinda faked two documents, neither of which were of much significance, but the second one got him pilloried by Birthers themselves. And really...that's about it. Remember, when Ed Hale has promised the release of revelatory documentation, he never faked it. He just never delivered on the promises.
You do have inbetween bad information and fake evidence an intermediate kind of lie, in the bogus story or anecdote. Jim Bancroft's story of meeting teenage Obama is silly, but I do suspect that he's sincerely deluded himself into believing it. Some of the more dishonest Birthers also claim to possess specific incriminating evidence, which they just decline to produce. I had an argument with butterdezillion last week after she repeatedly claimed to have heard certain claims on a radio show, and I proved she was full of it (though here, I believe she allowed herself to believe that her own faulty memory was more reliable than it really is). That makes them worse than the BS artists, IMO, but even they aren't actually taking steps to manufacture fake materials. They've just kept ramping up their rhetoric to the point where they ever have to plead secrecy or admit they're wrong, and they're incapable of the latter.
This is an overlong build-up to saying that while Danae is certainly a BS artist, and is capable of considerable feats of intellectual dishonesty, I'm not prepared to leap to the conclusion that she's a con artist, and has thus faked the copy of the birth certificate to win a bet. There's little justification to impute that uncommonly high level of malicious intent to her. And given that even the creases match up on her two documents, that means that faking it would have taken at least a reasonably high level of forethought to deceive. Given that, like Dr.C, I think that piece of paper was probably sent to her by Hawaii.
Of course, as pointed out, what she's delivered here isn't even close to what the Birthers want to see from Obama. Even the grouped photo doesn't really prove anything; unless her 'new' document existed only as a Photoshop creation, there's no reason it can't be in the same shot as the 'old' document. The photo doesn't prove that Hawaii made the copy and not her.
There's also been a lot of skepticism over Danae's narrative, and arguments made about why that should cast doubt onto the veracity of the document. I don't think one necessarily follows from the other here. While I think it's unlike Danae to fake a document and claim it's real, I don't think she's above misrepresenting the narrative that led to her receipt of it. Her alleged conversation with Alvin Onaka? I'd say it's fair that she talked to him on the phone, but I don't think we can assume at all that the conversation went the way she's described it. Similarly, she keeps referencing an "organization" she supposedly requested this for, but is remarkably cagey about this "organization." They wanted a state-issued birth certificate, but she didn't inquire as to whether it needed to be certified when asked? And she went ahead and asked for non-certified, even though she'd been trying to get a copy since April or so? Even though state certification is practically THE central issue in Birtherdom? That's just stupid. Not incomprehensibly stupid, but pretty remarkably stupid and short-sighted. Frankly, I suspect she wasn't actually given the option. It doesn't mean the document's fake; it means part of her story is.
Of course, Danae can put this whole question of whether one can actually get a
certified long-form from Hawaii to rest. And it'll only cost $10.