The last time I posted about Polarik here (outside of a passing mention in a footnote in "Secret Origin, Part 2") was over a year ago, when he claimed PolitiFact invented a rumor about Obama's middle name. Now he's again trying to shift responsibility for something Birther-related, with a YouTube video and a WorldNetDaily article that claim the White House website linked to a fake Certification of Live Birth that Polarik created on his computer.
This is his claim, as expressed at YouTube:
On April 27, 2011. Obama and his White House held a press conference in which they gave reporters a copy of his "long-form" birth certificate and a copy of his "short-form" birth certificate." That copy, now posted on WHITEHOUSE.GOV, came from the image I created and stored in my Photobucket account - they did not make a copy of his short-form because there is no short-form (the COLB).Ron's 'evidence' for this is essentially two-fold:
1) The White House blog linked to a black-and-white PDF scan of Obama's COLB that indicates that it was printed off the Snopes website, as it has a Snopes URL at the bottom.
2) An article on the Snopes website used to link to a COLB image in Polarik's Photobucket account.
He goes on at length (as he is wont to do), but that's the core of his claim. The only problem is that even given that both of the above are true, that still doesn't support his conclusion that the White House published and/or circulated an imitation document he'd created.
The White House printed off an image that was ON the Snopes server. The Snopes article linked to a Polarik image that was NOT on the Snopes server, but was rather on Photobucket's. The only way the White House published Polarik's image was if Snopes uploaded Polarik's image to its own server and published it at this address.
And Polarik provides absolutely zero evidence to support that conclusion. Rather, much of his argument contradicts it. He shares some charts showing pageviews of his Photobucket account that came from Snopes. But if web surfers are arriving at his account, then they're not looking at an image uploaded to Snopes' server.
After Polarik went public with this claim, several holes were pointed out in his story. The Snopes image has file info that says it was last modified "Saturday, November 15, 2008 3:19:50 PM." Polarik's fake COLB has file info that says it was last modified "Saturday, March 12, 2011 7:48:46 AM." Furthermore, the White House's image is clearly not Polarik's fake; there's a telltale uneven line of text at the bottom that clearly distinguishes the two. All too quickly, Ron's story was falling apart.
Now if I may interrupt my own narrative for a moment, let's go back a year, to June 2010. Polarik posts his own thread at FreeRepublic entitled "**Obama Bombshell** Blue Hawaii: Health Department falsified Obama's birth records!" In it, he wrote:
Sometime between October 31, 2008, and July 27, 2009, the dates of Health Director Chiyome Fukino's two press releases, Hawaii amended Obama's birth record. A brand-new Certificate of Live Birth (not Certification of Live Birth) was issued to him...When Freepers realized that Polarik wasn't being quite honest with them, he did an about-turn and posted a disclaimer, where he said that he'd posted his fake image to test people to see if they could spot it.
Not only did Obama get a new birth certificate, the certificate itself was designed with him in mind as Rev. 10/08 - coincidentally, the date of Fukino's first press release (10/31/08). Hawaii ditched the old Certification of Live Birth and switched to a hybrid form called a “Certificate of Live Birth” - formerly the name of the long-form birth certificate.
Say, "Aloha" to Obama's new COLB (Certificate of Live Birth):
[here Polarik put a Photobucket-hosted image of "Obama's new COLB"]
Click on the thumbnail for a full-size copy
Okay, that aside was to provide some context for how Polarik answered his current detractors. He updated his YouTube description so that it now says:
[ **UPDATE** Last year, I made a 2nd forgery with an obvious flaw in it (a tilted line) to see if people would notice it. They didn't. People are only seeing it now because the White House posted a black & white outline of my prior image (which does not have the flaw).You see? Sure, it looks like he was lying, but really he was just using a fake image to test people. Again.
That outline was made from my image shown in the video, but I left the link alone so that viewers can see the flawed forgery that so many have called a genuine copy of Obama's birth certificate.
He also added a single word to his original video description, to suit his new and improved story (addition emphasized):
That copy, now posted on WHITEHOUSE.GOV, came from the prior image I created and stored in my Photobucket accountNew story, new details.
Not that the new narrative makes a lick of sense. In attempting to incorporate various inconvenient facts, Polarik has ended up making the following claim:
That Polarik created a fake COLB and posted it to his Photobucket account. That Snopes downloaded it and uploaded it to their server. That as a 'test', Polarik replaced his original fake with a crappier fake that had a tilted line. And that the White House printed out the original fake from Snopes and gave it to the press.
So now we have TWO Polarik-created fakes, one which has a tilted line and one which he says exists but hasn't shown. Plus an inexplicable scheme to switch out a really good fake for a not-so-good fake to see if people noticed. And a claim that the White House published a fake he created, but not the same fake he originally claimed they published a few days ago.
Still, even as silly as that sounds, is it believable? No. In trying to salvage his story, he simply made it worse.
For starters, one can view Polarik's Photobucket RSS feed to see when images were uploaded. "BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg" was indeed uploaded on March 12, 2011. Rather curiously, images called "Barack Obama's birth certificate (Factcheck copy)" and "Barack Obama's birth certificate (Fight The Smears copy)" were also uploaded the day before on March 11...and they're the same fakes with the tilted line. 'Test' or not, he was certainly out to lie to people about what his uploads represented.
This upload date demonstrates one of the problems with Polarik's new timeline. He uploaded the tilted line fake on March 12, but the White House printout was made on April 25, 2011. Yet the White House image is clearly not the March 12 fake. In fact, Polarik's version 2.0 story is maddeningly irrational; if Snopes had already linked to a fake he created, then why replace it with a more obvious fake? And why, when you go public, do you only brag about Snopes linking to the obvious fake, and not mention the 'prior image' at all until you revise your story?
The feed doesn't show when the original "BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg" was uploaded to Polarik's Photobucket account, but there was indeed a prior image at that URL. However, it wasn't a fake; it was the real thing. Israel Insider linked to it way back on June 24, 2008. Polarik certainly hadn't created a polished fake within two weeks of the original release of the COLB. He simply uploaded the real image, using the same filename that the DailyKos had used. Then in March 2011, for some reason, he replaced it with an imitation.
In browsing my computer files, I found something of note:
See there? "BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg," which I saved July 20, 2009. Followed by several other Polarik-created COLB files which I saved contemporaneously while I was writing about Polarik. And what does BO_Birth_Certificate.jpg look like?
Yep. It's just the plain ol' real COLB. If you open it in a separate window from the tilted line fake, you can see the differences for yourself. This isn't merely a shifting of a line; the entire rattan background changes, as does the border.
So, long story short, what do we have here? Snopes may have linked to a once-legitimate image URL on Polarik's Photobucket account, which Polarik originally uploaded in June 2008 but surreptitiously swapped out for an imitation image in March 2011. (This is a reminder of the risks of hotlinking to outside sites.) The White House printed out a legitimate image that was saved to the Snopes server, said image having nothing at all to do with Polarik's March 2011 fake. There's no evidence whatsoever of Polarik's 'prior' fake that was first mentioned in his revised story. Polarik's first attempt at his story may have gotten published at WND, but its faults caused him to revise it, but the narrative still crumbles under basic scrutiny.
Good explanation, Loren. I'm glad you have lots of saved Polarik data- his claims are going to get crazier and crazier over time, and will need a rational debunking such as this.
ReplyDelete-obsolete
This is a very clear exposition of the facts. Congratulations.
ReplyDeleteI think you totally missed the point that he was trying to make. He was mostly interested in demonstrating that instead of the White House being in possession of a real hard-copy from Hawaii that they could themselves easily scan, or photograph and post on the WH website, they instead resorted to linking to or obtaining an outside version that had no certified attestation behind it, whose origin was not something they could prove. If they were the creators of the first image that DailyKos mysteriously obtained, then why was that never publicly made known? There would be no reason to hide that fact, unless it weren't factual.
ReplyDeletePoint 2. Dr. Pollard may be guilty of what others are guilty of, which is in referring to his original COLB as being a fake, when it was not his creation at all but merely a re-sized version that matched standard screen resolution of 768 X 1024 pixels. I believe his account is that he replaced that with an altered version in March 2011, years after it was online unaltered.
Still, it seems his claim that what is on the Snopes.com or White House servers are versions of his re-sized version are not provable since anyone can re-size any image to screen size. If he had sized it at 1023 or 1025 pixels, then his claim would have credibility -if that were the size of the other versions. But as usual, we are left with many unanswered questions instead.
see my extensive LF COLB expose and fake SF at http://photobucket.com/obama_bc
h2ooflife: Yes, it is provable, but first of all, , you got the size wrong.
ReplyDeleteWhat ison Snopes is an image 1024 x 1000 pixels and I am the first and only person to produce an image that size. Any others you see are either mine or made from mine.
Aslo, what is on Snopes is not simply a resized version of an existing image: it is one that I created using the image posted on Factcheck June 16, 2008.
To prove that the Kos image was a version of the Factcheck image that blog owner, Markos Moulitsas claimed he trimmed (but never said why he trimmed it), and that the original image posted by Fight The Smears in a PDF (for only 16 hours though) on June 12, 2008, contained a 42% direct reduction of Markos trimmed image, here is what`I did:
I trimmed the Factcheck image exactly as Markos had trimmed his. Since he resaved his image at 44% quality using an unknown editor, my goal was to make an image comparable to his in terms of quality, color, color count, and file size.
That was the first step.
Markos' image contained the same Photoshop Exif data as in the Factcheck image, but it was not saved in Photoshop.
The next step was making a replica of the image that appeared in the PDF file to be the same file size as the 2nd image posted on fight The Smears - one that was not made from the Kos image since its dimensions were 585 x 575 - and did not match up with the Kos aspect ratio.
I also made it have the same file size as the 2nd FTS image, of 110k, and also keep the original Photoshop Exif data in it.
Also, since the image on Snopes is the my image, i.e, the only one to have the Photoshop Exif data along with the original file size of the Kos image, 2427 x 2369px, and 110k, that clearly proves it is my original image and mine alone because i have the intermediary image - the Kos-sized version of the Factcheck image.
That Kos-sized version is idiosyncratic as well and that image has never been posted on the Internet.
True, these images were not "original recreations" of the Obama forgery like the ones I have now, but they were intented to prove that the Obama Campaign - and now the Obama Administration - has never had its own images to post.