NYT: Hawaii’s Governor Takes On ‘Birthers’ (excerpts)
(This is what happens when out-of-town reporters start interviewing Abercrombie. Unlike his local media buddies who cover for Abercrombie 24/7/365, the out-of-town reporters don’t realize that they are supposed to overlook stuff like this.)
HONOLULU — Gov. Neil Abercrombie of Hawaii, who befriended President Obama’s parents when they were university students here, has been in office for less than three weeks. But he is so incensed over “birthers” — the conspiracy theorists who assert that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya and was thus not eligible to become president — that he is seeking ways to change state policy to allow him to release additional proof that the president was born in Honolulu in 1961.
“It’s an insult to his mother and to his father, and I knew his mother and father; they were my friends, and I have an emotional interest in that,” Governor Abercrombie said in a telephone interview late Thursday. “It’s an emotional insult. It is disrespectful to the president; it is disrespectful to the office.”
The governor, a Democrat and former congressman, said he has initiated conversations with the state’s attorney general and the chief of its Health Department about how he can release more explicit documentation of Mr. Obama’s birth on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital. He said he has done so of his own accord, without consulting the White House, which declined to comment….
Now that he is in office, Mr. Abercrombie is facing a $71 million deficit this year and 10 times that amount in the years to come. Mr. Obama talked about the problem at a news conference Wednesday in Washington when he spoke, imprecisely, about “schools that are laying off so many teachers that they start going to four days a week, as they’ve done in Hawaii, for example.” In fact, Hawaii instituted furloughs to avoid layoffs.
Even so, the new governor said he was having the time of his life.
“If I was having a better time,” he said, laughing, “I’d have to be arrested.”
But on the matter of the birthers, Mr. Abercrombie grew serious. “I’m going to take care of that,” he said, though he acknowledged that they would be difficult to convince…. (Obviously Abercrombie's handlers are on vacation. Aoki, Asselbaye WHERE ARE YOU???)
Mr. Abercrombie, 72, said that although he did not see the elder Obamas at the hospital with their newborn son, he did remember the couple bringing the baby to social events. He says the critics who suggest that Mr. Obama’s mother slipped off to Kenya to give birth are engaging in a “demonological fantasy.” (Unlike all the Obamabots who said Bush is Hitler.) And he is angry about legislation in several states that would require presidential candidates to document that they were born in this country. A similar bill died in Congress last year.
“My thought was, ‘Wait a minute, why didn’t you ask me, my friends in the national Congress, the House of Representatives?’ ” he said. “They know me, they know that I was here, but they didn’t even bother to have the courtesy to do that, which is disappointing to me, because it is very difficult for me not to conclude that bills like that are meant as a coded message that he is not really American. My thought is, rather than get into some kind of argument or play into that mentality, why not just simply try to authenticate this and let the facts speak for themselves?”
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RELATED: A New Day In Hawaii: For Abercrombie, discrediting 'birthers' is a top priority
After LA Times and NY Times both independently cover Abercrombie’s Birther Battle and the AP version appears in hundreds of newspapers nationally, the Star-Advertiser finally gets around to running the story: Discrediting anti-Obama 'birthers' is a top priority for Hawaii governor
