Mythbusting the Honolulu Newspaper Birth Announcement
Conservative blogger Tom Maguire takes issue with my story today, specifically the part about Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) presidential campaign checking the record on Barack Obama’s citizenship and coming away satisfied.
“„Barack’s mom and maternal grandparents had a strong incentive to create a paper trail documenting Obama as a US citizen back in 1961 and it had nothing to do with assuring his future viability as a Presidential candidate. All they needed to do was imagine a day when the white Ms. Dunham would be engaged in a custody fight in a Kenyan court contesting the fate of a black Kenyan baby sought by the black Kenyan father and his African family, and their course would have been clear.
The problem with this? Parents and relatives don’t, and didn’t, get to place birth announcements in the Honolulu Advertiser or the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. As a Star-Bulletin employee explained to WorldNetDaily, the editors “print what we receive from the Department of Health Vital Statistics System,” and did so in 1961. And the Advertiser worked the same way.
Unsurprisingly, WorldNetDaily used that information to argue that the state could have had bogus information that it passed on to the newspaper, which is absurd on its face. But it really should be enough to debunk this “Obama’s grandparents lied to win a future custody suit” theory.
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