SATURDAY UPDATE: I’m officially amused. The video was a knowing joke by VICE-sters. The debunkable bits were easter eggs, of a sort, which explains why I was able to point them out even before my criminal justice degree comes back from the University of Phoenix. In reality, there’s been no serious Original Receipe Birther outbreak since last month, when a confused man asked Kansas to take Barack Obama off the ballot because he might be Kenyan. Carry on.
It really does feel like the Obama Conspiracyverse has moved on from pure birtherism to the theory that the president’s real father was Frank Marshall Davis. So I welcome this flashback from Vice, a video from a crazy person who thinks it’s proof that Barack Obama was born in a Kenyan hospital in 1961.
It’s so damn debunk-able, it hurts. First, notice the curious closing shot of the Kenyan flag, which is placed (for some reason) at the foot of the bed. A calender earlier in the shot – also, hilariously, zoomed in on as if the videographer is trying to find the Cloverfield monster – tells us that we’re in 1961.
This was Kenya’s flag in 1961.
Peter, the man behind the video, tells Vice that “an associate from Africa contacted me and said that he had a VHS transfer of the original Super-8 film.” There was no Super 8 film in 1961. It was rolled out in 1964.
Well, that was fun.
