NRO Debunks the Photoshopped Afterbirth Conspiracy

It's not often that I link to NRO to support President Obama. But that's just how crazy the birther issue has become.  In other words, it's very sad when a far right wing Republican magazine is the sane, rationale voice in what is a shameful display of modern America.

One of the more ridiculous claims coming from Republican birthers is the long form birth certificate released Wednesday by the president is a photoshopped fake.  No one expected the release of the document to appease the birthers.  They are a crazy group who flourish in this internet age of digital media.  So the endless number of videos popping up on YouTube is no surprise.  However, NRO actually proving just how unhinged the conspiracists are is a welcomed sight.

I'm going to repost Nathan Goulding's Photoshop examination in its entirety just to prove how crazy this whole thing is:

PDF Layers in Obama’s Birth Certificate April 27, 2011 2:35 P.M. By Nathan Goulding     We have received several e-mails today calling into question the validity of the PDF that the White House released, namely that there are embedded layers in the document. There are now severalother people on the case. We looked into it and dismissed it. The PDF is composed of multiple images. That’s correct. Using a photo editor or PDF viewer of your choice, you can extract this image data, view it, hide it, etc. But these layers, as they’re being called, aren’t layers in the traditional photo-editing sense of the word. They are, quite literally, pieces of image data that have been positioned in a PDF container. They appear as text but also contain glyphs, dots, lines, boxes, squiggles, and random garbage. They’re not combined or merged in any way. Quite simply, they look like they were created programmatically, not by a human. What’s plausible is that somewhere along the way — from the scanning device to the PDF-creation software, both of which can perform OCR (optical character recognition) — these partial/pseudo-text images were created and saved. What’s not plausible is that the government spent all this time manufacturing Obama’s birth certificate only to commit the laughably rookie mistake of exporting the layers from Photoshop, or whatever photo editing software they are meant to have used. It’s likely that whoever scanned the birth certificate in Hawaii forgot to turn off the OCR setting on the scanner. Let’s leave it at that. UPDATE: I’ve confirmed that scanning an image, converting it to a PDF, optimizing that PDF, and then opening it up in Illustrator, does in fact create layers similar to what is seen in the birth certificate PDF. You can try it yourself at home.

UPDATE II: For those of you who still aren’t convinced, here’s a one-page PDF that I just scanned and optimized, so you can see for yourself that an optimized PDF shows up in Illustrator as layers. (I didn’t spend hours getting the settings right.)

Again, this won't stop those who want to believe Obama is a fraud from doing so. The people who believe this kind of stuff are the same people who believed President Clinton was a drug dealer that had his opposition murdered, and that Hillary personally shot Vince Foster. They are the same people who screamed for years that Clinton was going to come take their guns away and lock them in concentration camps; that believe government is inherently evil unless of course they are benefiting directly from its social programs.

No, this won't change their minds.  But it does show the rest of us how crazy they are and the lengths they'll sink just because of their own self-delusion.