This past week marked Newsmax’s official coming out as a member of the birther conspiracy, demanding the release of Barack Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate.
While it had published the occasional article touching on it, it was never as obsessed as WorldNetDaily. That shifted in July with a repetition of birther talking points, repeated in an Aug. 3 article claiming that “Lou Dobbs is right” on the issue.
Newsmax editor Christopher Ruddy officially signed on this week — first in an Aug. 3 appearance on “The O’Reilly Factor” (apparently subbing for WND’s Joseph Farah, whose demands O’Reilly decided not to accede to), then in an Aug. 5 column rehashing those old talking points.
While Ruddy asserts that “I believe Obama was born somewhere in the state of Hawaii,” he adds that “we have no idea of his birthplace,” and concludes with a list of presidential birthplaces, with Obama’s listed as “unknown.”
Ruddy then tries to reframe the issue: “The issue over Obama’s birth certificate is not about President Obama’s citizenship. It is about his honesty and his promise to be the most transparent president ever.” Or it could be that the issue is Obama’s critics refusing to accept the validity of official state documents in order to de-legitimize him. Ruddy is curiously silent on that possibility.