Is he even an American?

I've hesitated posting on this because often these claims are ridiculous but if you've followed this Obama birth certificate issue you have to wonder why in the hell the Obama campaign is fronting a fake birth certificate on its "smears" site.

NRO has some information on the issue and a blog Israeli Insider.

In a rambling interview with the Daily Kos -- the blog site that published the supposedly authentic Barack Hussein Obama birth certificate and his own birth certificate manipulations in the same June 12 post, Jay McKinnon, aka opendna, says he manipulated the Obama birth certificate to create a blank Hawaii birth certificate as a "template," supposedly for a John McCain birth certificate. But he says it was not an attempt at deception but a "lame joke" that he now regrets.

But in trying to avoid legal trouble by diminished the significance of manipulating electronic images, he further undermines the explicit claims of the Barack Obama campaign and the Daily Kos itself that the posted images of his purported birth certificate prove that the candidate was Hawaii-born. McKinnon, who says he was trained in document analysis by the Department of Homeland Security, says it's impossible to assess the authenticity of a birth certificate from image files rather than paper documents. "It should be self-evident that a JPEG [image file] of a scanned official document cannot be valid."

While that conclusion echoes and strengthens the calls of those who have been demanding that Obama provide paper proof, McKinnon undermines his own credibility from the get-go when he claims that he first encountered the Obama birth certificate issue "around June 12, 2008" when "As I recall, someone sent me an email containing two images. One of the Decosta birth certificate and the other from Fight The Smears. The subject line was 'Birth Certificate Appears to be "Invalid."

The only trouble with that statement is that McKinnon had already created the blank Hawaii birth certificate template for John McCain and the "Ahphorgerie" joke on June 12 before Fight the Smears had even published the birth certificate. Kos had published it that morning, about four hours earlier. Patricia DeCosta's birth certificate surfaced in the blogosphere only a week later, on June 19. So how did he compare the documents? And why would he say it was the first he'd heard of the birth certificate controversy when he had already posted his own patently fake certificates.

Judge for yourself.