Garcia Media Life

Donald Trump says it took him all of a half hour to find his own birth certificate. Maybe he should have taken the less than 15 minutes it took for me to find Barack Obama’s.

Politically, I understand why Mr. Trump is putting his celebrity stamp on the “birther” cause; appearing on one TV talk show after another as if it was 2008 and he just discovered a huge conspiracy.  Factually, it’s disingenuous. This has been settled for more than three years now.

We’ll leave aside the point that The Donald’s birth certificate comes nowhere near the standards being demanded of the President’s proof of birth. Trump does not provide a legally legitimate birth certificate and perhaps that’s why it took him less than an hour to get it. He has a copy that was sent to him by his hospital- it has no seal, it is not even an official copy- and it is simply not a legal document in any way, shape or form.

Here, however, is Barack Obama’s legal birth certificate. And you can link to it yourself here.

In a rush to release the documentation in 2008 to counter the rumors about a missing certificate, the Obama campaign staff intially redacted the certificate number as explained by then spokesman, Shauna Daly: “[We] couldn’t get someone on the phone in Hawaii to tell us whether the number represented some secret information, and we erred on the side of blacking it out. Since then we’ve found out it’s pretty irrelevant for the outside world.” The actual certificate on file in Hawaii has the certficate number and a picture of it is below.

Here is a picture of Factcheck.org’s, Joe Miller, actually holding the document in his own hands:

This is the signature stamp from the official with the state of Hawaii who authenticated in 2007 that this was a legal copy of the birth certificate:

This is a picture of the raised seal on the back of the birth certificate that further authenticates it:

This is the legal certificate number on the document that also authenticates it:

This is a copy of the birth announcement published in the Honolulu Advertiser newspaper on Sunday, August 13, 1961:

All of the above items are what the Department of State says is needed as proof of American citizenship. Case closed.

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I once had to come up with my legal birth certificate in the process of settling my mother’s estate about ten years ago. I had a copy of it, mind you, but that is not a legal document. I had to go through the state of New York, provide notarized proof of my legal identity, and then wait for about three weeks. They give you an authenticated copy because the actual original lives in a vault somewhere.

So it came in the mail and I’ll never forget it because of the postmark on the envelope: September 11, 2001. That’s right. The New York City Health Department, on the day it was beginning to handle hundreds and hundreds of death certificates for the victims of 9/11, had somehow found the time to send me the legal copy of the document authenticating my birth.

There is one thing that deeply disturbs me about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. It indicates that for the first time in my life- a President of the United States is younger than me.

Now, that hurts.

Update:  Donald Trump has located his legal birth certificate and his red-faced staff is now distributing it everywhere.