I have one of the most liberal comment policies in the blogosphere. No authentication or sign-in is required, and I almost never delete comments for offensiveness. (See these gems if you doubt me.) I have on rare occasions edited a comment when people have asked me to.

But as I've said many times, this is not a debating forum, and comments do not create an obligation on my part to do anything. I don't even have to read them, nor am I obligated in the slightest to reply to comments, especially when they might distract me or interfere with my posting. It's one of the ways I've been able to keep blogging on a daily basis.

The only exception to my liberal comments policy, of course, is spam. Spam can take many forms, but what it all has in common is that it's canned, unoriginal, and spit out in quantity order to use the host to call attention to something that is usually of a commercial nature. I said "usually" for two reasons. Some spam is incomprehensible garbled text, with no apparent or discernible meaning, and no identifiable URLs or email addresses going anywhere. I don't know what it is, but I have to assume that someone must have intended something, for why would anyone expend time posting gibberish like this?

mxive sdhg gaxr rowhsupmb ixfrza vofwix ucfopbnk

Another category of non-commercial spam (at least, I think it's non-commercial) falls into canned political advocacy. People will cut and paste stuff they've seen somewhere, or possibly created themselves, in the hope of calling attention to a point. Not that it really matters, but on occasion I have been fooled into thinking that comments were original and later learned that they were simply cut and paste jobs. If I see this repeatedly, I might be tempted to delete it, especially if the comment was really long and monotonous and interfered with the normal flow of genuine comments.

Last night, the same comment -- a long cut and paste from Philip Berg's site which I appended to this post -- was pasted into two different posts which had nothing to do with the issue advanced in the comment, which was the unending Obama birth certificate nonsense.

I have to say that at this point, the Birth Certificate Truthers are starting to resemble Ron Paul spammers. The State of Hawaii certifed that Obama was born there (in Honolulu), and there's a presumption of legitimacy of state records which cannot be overcome by Internet rumor. There's simply no case.

While a Certificate of Live Birth is precisely such a legal certification, recently, the State of Hawaii went further with this additional verification by Department Of Health Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino:

"Therefore, I as Director of Health for the State of Hawai'i, along with the Registrar of Vital Statistics who has statutory authority to oversee and maintain these type of vital records, have personally seen and verified that the Hawai'i State Department of Health has Sen. Obama's original birth certificate on record in accordance with state policies and procedures. No state official, including Governor Linda Lingle, has ever instructed that this vital record be handled in a manner different from any other vital record in the possession of the State of Hawai'i," Fukino said.

Will this put a stop to the idiotic rumors? Of course not!

That's why I spent most of a day trying to track down the Internet "report" which lies at the heart of Philip Berg's case. There is no report; it is simply a rumor which Berg either started or repeated.

In part at least, I blame the mainstream media for fueling this conspiracy theory.
I'm still sore over the way I spent most of a day laboriously checking out Berg's allegation only to be told that I was wasting time.

With all apologies to those who think I wasted time, there was a reason I devoted so much time to this. A number of major bloggers (including four sites I respect, but will not name only out of respect for them) not only put time into this, but they took it seriously. That's why it so annoyed me to be derided for trying to do what I consider basic honest blogging -- looking for the source of an allegation, and finding none, then debunking it as a rumor, in the hope that others might not waste time. (It goes to blogger integrity -- something that still exists, but which I worry might be fading as an operating principle.)

What never seems to have occured the wildly partisan Birth Certificate Truthers was that as an opponent of Obama, I'd love nothing more than for it to have been true. But a fraudulent claim won't cut it. In fact, it only makes things worse and wastes the time of sincere people who could be doing other things.

One of my pet peeves is when people like stories and then cite them as true just because they're what they want to hear. It's a disease, one which feeds on human temptation to take the easy and low road. I know; I've been guilty of it too. Over the years I've learned that the more I like something, the more suspicious I should be. Here's what I said almost five years ago:

In attempting to analyze unsettled and vexing stories, I try to avoid the following common pitfalls:

the temptation of believing what I want to believe

the temptation of disbelieving (denying) what I don't want to believe

the temptation of clinging too tenaciously to my own conclusions (if any)

the temptation of being adversely influenced by emotions instead of logic (loud and ugly tones, or harsh rhetoric make me distrustful; reasonable tones engender trust and can create illusions of truth)

One of the principles that attracted me to blogging when I started was the emphasis on factual accuracy. Unfortunately, as the blogosphere has gotten bigger, this has given way in some circles to competing narratives, left and right. Or get the traffic.

WorldNetDaily is of course continuing to provide fuel for the Birth Certificate Truthers. A few days ago, Jerome Corsi (who continually plugs his book) made it clear that the answer to the LGF question of whether the Hawaiian statement would ever put a stop to the idiotic rumors is an unequivocal NO!

...there is considerable evidence that Obama was born in Kenya, not in Hawaii as the candidate and his campaign have maintained.

[Barack Obama's uncle] acknowledged he was not sure whether his brother, Barack Obama senior, practiced Islam or whether Barack Obama junior was born in Kenya or in Hawaii.

And this:

The issue of the authenticity of Obama's original birth certificate is further muddied by communications from Sen. Obama's half-sister, Maya Soetoro, who has claimed Obama was born in two different Hawaii hospitals.

I don't know whether he's imagining that he's thrown the ball back in Little Green Footballs' court, but Corsi then goes on to attack the official certification of the certificate, because (he claims) the original circumstances of the birth are insufficiently described:

On Thursday, KGMB9 News reported that Hawaii's top health official, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, was trying to defuse rumors that Barack Obama was born in Kenya by saying she had seen the birth certificate herself, but said Hawaii laws aimed at stopping identity theft prevented her from releasing the document despite multiple requests to do so.

Fukino failed to resolve the controversy by disclosing whether the "official document" she saw had been generated in a Kenyan hospital or in a Hawaiian hospital.

But now, claims Corsi, there's a new video proving Obama's birth in Hawaii:

The controversy is further fueled by a video posted on YouTube in which Obama's Kenyan grandmother Sarah claims to have witnessed personally Obama's birth in Kenya. The YouTube.com video tape also features Sayid Obama who was interviewed by WND.

To date, Obama and his campaign have refused to disclose the name of the doctor delivering the candidate or the precise hospital where he was born.

The main reason doubts persist regarding Obama's birth certificate is this question: If an original Hawaii-doctor-generated and Hawaii-hospital-released Obama birth certificate exists, why wouldn't the senator and his campaign simply order the document released and end the controversy?

That Obama has not ordered Hawaii officials to release the document leaves doubts as to whether an authentic Hawaii birth certificate exists for Obama.

Rather, the failure to release the document fuels the theory - true or not - that the Obama family, shortly after Obama's birth overseas, returned to Hawaii and registered at the Hawaii Department of Health the original Obama birth certificate that had been issued by the doctor and hospital that delivered Obama in Kenya.

Now, it might be nice to know the name of the doctor and the hospital, and maybe the Obama campaign (if that is what it is now) should be more forthcoming in the hope of calming down the Truthers. But these details are not supplied on Hawaii's official form, nor are they required, so their absence proves absolutely nothing that would shed light on whether Obama was born in Hawaii.

Then there's the video that Corsi and WorldNetDaily keep plugging. They say that

...a video posted on YouTube features Obama's Kenyan grandmother Sarah claiming to have witnessed Obama's birth in Kenya.

There is nothing but the woman's statement that,

Barack Obama is a son of this village.

A massaged translation of a YouTube video will not overcome the presumption of validity of official state records.

As I explained previously, the issue is no longer forgery.

They are saying that the State of Hawaii is lying.

It's a waste of time, and I wish I didn't have to debunk it further. But one thing I have learned is that no matter how many times things are debunked, people will still believe them.

My problem is this. People say I am wasting my time, but the reason I'm doing this that is because reliable bloggers and web sites commonly believed to be responsible continue to advance this theory.

Perhaps I should stop considering them responsible and move on to real things.

But as is the case in any conspiracy theory, there is always the lingering question of why. Corsi keeps asking why Obama and his campaign "have refused to disclose the name of the doctor delivering the candidate or the precise hospital where he was born."

From what I've seen of conspiracy theory proponents, I'll hazard a guess as to why. Because conspiracy theories operate in a closed loop format. If answers to the questions are not forthcoming, that proves the conspiracy. But if there are answers, well, all answers to questions propounded by conspiracy theorists simply lead to additional questions, because the answers are assumed to be lies. First the birth certificate was said to have been forged, but once it became clear that the official document existed, the Truthers switched to a claim that it was obtained by fraud, and is an official government lie. People who think that way will never be satisfied by explanations.

Suppose Obama were to come up with some hospital birth certificate. (Never mind that these are not accepted for official purposes and will not satisfy the requirements for passport applications.) The hospital would be accused of lying, and so would the doctor who claimed he delivered the infant Barack Obama. That's assuming the doctor is still alive. If he's deceased, then his death can be thrown into the conspiracy brew. And why did the hospital officials "hide" this information for so long? To come up with another very clever forgery? We can't be too careful, folks.

"The released 'records' raise more questions than they answer."

And of course, by disputing the Truthers, I'm part of the coverup. Obviously, I want to help the Obamanation machine achieve world dominance as part of my plot to destroy American sovereignty.

You know what? The doctor who delivered me is dead!

Connect the dots....