Is it a forgery? *UPDATED*

Gateway Pundit has amassed a fair amount of evidence that the birth certificate is a manipulated document.

If the information Gateway Pundit has collected is correct, it seems to be a peculiarly inartfully done forgery.  Within minutes of looking at the document, people familiar with pdfs and Photoshop and illustrator programs were able to unmask various layers that would not exist in a straight scan, but that would exist in a document that had data added, deleted or moved around.

Which leads to the big question:  Why?  Why would Obama do a cheesy forgery?

Thomas Lifson thinks, and I agree, that this is another Obama head fake.  He’ll let people froth themselves into a frenzy, and then produce an actual hard copy that comports in all particulars with this manipulated pdf.  No one will remember that he produced a forged (or manipulated) document in the first instance.  Instead, the media will play up the fact that Obama’s opponents are racist, paranoid loonies, as evidenced by the fact that they doubted a document that was, in fact, the real deal.

I want to address here jj’s point that the birth certificate, fake or not, shows conclusively that Obama, even though born in the U.S., was not a citizen insofar as the Constitution demanded.  The reason was that, at the time Obama was born, his father’s alien status and his mother’s immaturity meant he did not rank as “natural born citizen.”  Technically speaking, jj is absolutely right.  But there isn’t a snowball’s chance in Hell that any court, let alone the Supreme Court, is going to let a legal technicality stand in the way of the fact that a purportedly true long form birth certificate shows that the man was born on American soil.  I’m therefore not going to let myself get emotionally invested in that argument, correct though it may be.

UPDATE:  I Own The World weighs in on the crude document manipulation involved.  Again, it’s the crudity more than the forgery that’s interesting.  It’s impossible to believe that the Obama crew cannot do better.  That they didn’t is deliberate.  We’re being played, although sometimes one has to play out a hand regardless of a known set-up.

(Please note that, per I Own The World, which refers, without a link, to NRO, some of the anomalies can be explained by running the original PDF through an optical character recognition mode.  That explanation, however, does not explain all anomalies, which just deepens the mystery.)

UPDATE II:  Fascinating video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eOfYwYyS_c[/youtube]

Honest to God, I feel as if I’m being gaslighted, but I don’t know by whom (Obama or the Birthers).  I’m disinclined to trust the Obama crowd but, if the Birthers really are monomaniacs, I’m scared to be sucked into their delusion.

The two things, though, that we know with certainty are that Obama lies often and is a lousy, lousy president.