That's a right-wing characteristic. They'd rather tear out their toenails with pliers than apologize about anything.
But you will see a link to an earlier Scared Monkeys story, titled "Not Quite RAthERGATE, but Tests Show That Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate Is a Forgery." That post refers to the alleged fraudulence of the "short form" COB, originally posted on Daily Kos. Obviously, the Scared Monkeys people want to plant suspicion in the minds of their readers: If the first birth certificate was fake, then the new one is probably fake as well.
So what's the evidence? The links go to a 2008 "comprehensive analysis" by -- oh no! -- Pamela Geller's Atlas Shrugged. As many of you will recall, that "comprehensive analysis" was done by the dreaded Techdude, whom I proved to be an absolute fraud in a series of posts.
Techdude turned out to be a guy named Adam Fink. At least, his claimed resume matched that of a fellow named Adam Fink -- word for word. Either "Techdude" filched the resume, or he lied when he told another researcher that he was not Fink.
When I tried to call Fink about this matter -- and I made repeated attempts -- he would neither pick up the phone nor return calls. (Yes, I was polite.) And that, apparently, is how he treated all potentially unfriendly inquiries.
Not very encouraging. That's not the way a pro acts.
Fink claimed that using super-special imaging techniques (involving either GIMP or Photoshop), he was able to prove that the birth certificate originally named Barack Obama's sister. The problem: Nobody was ever able to replicate his work.
I certainly was not able to do so, and I've used Photoshop since the very first public release.
Fink and the Finkettes kept waving his alleged c.v. around, as though that settled that. But science is not a matter of resumes; one must present evidence in the form of a replicable procedure.
Techdude said that I "failed Photoshop 101" -- yet he never was able to provide a series of steps that anyone could replicate. In fact, his "directions" regarding how he did what he did made no sense whatsoever. It soon became obvious that he was using techno-gobbledygook to con the layperson.
He never showed the relevant jpgs of his work, although he tried to dazzle unthinking readers with scads of non-relevant images. He claims to be a courtroom-quality expert, yet he apparently uses the freeware GIMP program, not Photoshop (the industry standard).
I offered the Dude a challenge. I "hid" a message (a Shakespeare quote) in a version of the birth certificate, using the same methods that (according to the Dude) the Obamites used to fake up the COB. And I asked Techdude if he could identify the quote.
Nope. He couldn't.
You know why? Because -- contrary to Techdude's assertion -- if you take a chunk of background material and paste it over some text, and if you then flatten the layers, that text is gone, gone, GONE with a capital G. (We're presuming that the material used to cover up the text was 100% opaque -- and there is no reason why it wouldn't be.) No matter how you fiddle with the dials, you won't be able to tease those letters back into existence.
Sorry, but that is the way it is. I've read a lot of books about Photoshop, and none of them have even hinted that it is possible to do what Fink says he did.
Well, I've gone on too long, recapitulating old battles. The point is this: The right-wing liars at Scared Monkeys have never acknowledged that Techdude was outed as a fraud. They've never mentioned the uncomfortable fact that no-one was ever able to replicate his work. They've never mentioned the fact that Techdude never offered one iota of proof for his assertions.
Yet they are still selling the great Techdude con job!
Once again, we see proof that libertarians LIE. Their entire ideology is based on a series of lies about history. And about science.
(Incidentally, there's a lot more to the Rathergate story, which I wrote about in the early days of this blog. We may get back to that at another time.)
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