Right wing hacks repeat discredited lies

A local conservative blog is again making reference to claims that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that the Hawaiian birth certificate his campaign has released is a forgery. This is only a “continuing controversy” because right wing hacks continue to repeat these baseless claims in spite of the fact that they have been thoroughly and repeatedly debunked.

As repeatedly documented by Media Matters:

...the Obama campaign has posted a copy of Obama's birth certificate on its "Fight the Smears" website and reportedly provided the original to FactCheck.org, whose staff concluded in an August 21 post that it "meets all of the requirements from the State Department for proving U.S. citizenship." A Hawaii Health Department official also reportedly confirmed to PolitiFact.com that Obama's birth certificate is valid.

Even right-wing sites like WorldNetDaily have looked into this and concluded that the claim that the birth certificate is a forgery has been discredited.

Why do people continue to read and listen to blowhards who knowingly repeat lies? Does the concept of credibility even exist anymore? By any reasonable standard these false rumor-mongers should by now be so thoroughly discredited that they would have sunk into richly deserved obscurity never to be heard from again.

What would it take for these people to lose their credibility?

Does the concept of credibility still exist? People are sometimes threatened that their credibility will be destroyed and no one will ever pay attention to them again. If the person in question is a conservative then that is now an empty threat because Fox News and right-wing talk radio will put people on the air no matter how defective their epistemology turns out to be. Media Matters reports on a recent example of this phenomenon:

On the August 11 edition of the syndicated radio program The War Room With Quinn & Rose, guest host Mike Pintek echoed right-wing blogs and websites in questioning the authenticity of Sen. Barack Obama's birth certificate, which was posted on the Obama campaign's Fight the Smears website in response to the false claim that Obama is not a natural-born citizen. Pintek asserted: "I still keep wondering about his birthplace and his birth certificate. I'm still not convinced that he actually was born a natural-born citizen." Pintek went on to add: "According to some people who know what they're talking about, who are experts on this, they say that the birth certificate that he's got on his website and has been posted to the Daily Kos and some other places, is -- it looks very much like a Photoshop deal and doesn't look legit."

Who were these experts that Pintek is listening to? They don't include the definitive source on the authenticity of the birth certificate – the Hawaii Department of Health:

In an August 13 article, The Honolulu Advertiser reported that Hawaii Department of Health spokeswoman Janice Okubo said that her office contacted the Obama campaign to find a solution to the repeated requests for Obama's birth certificate. She reportedly said that the Obama campaign "responded and apparently it isn't good enough that he posted his birth certificate." She reportedly added: "They say they want it because they claim he is not a citizen of the United States. It's pretty ridiculous."

So these people Pintek accepts as experts "who know what they're talking about" say the birth certificate vouched for by the Hawaii Department of Health "doesn't look legit." Obviously Pintek and his "experts" are looking for authenticity in all the wrong places. I am starting to suspect that conservatives have a different concept of truth than the rest of us.