Monday, August 30, 2010

Obama: Can't plaster birth certificate on forehead

US President Barack Obama has said that he cannot spend all his time with his birth certificate plastered on his forehead to counter the misinformation campaign his detractors are running against him dubbing him as a Muslim.

"I would say that I can't spend all my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead," Obama told the NBC news in an interview in response to question regarding to a recent poll according to which 18 per cent of Americans believe that he was a Muslim, dismissing the results of a recent Pew Research Centre.

"The facts are the facts. So, it's not something that I can I think spend all my time worrying about. I don't think the American people want me to spend all my time worrying about it," he said.

The President said he went through this kind of misinformation campaign during his election campaign.

"You know, there is a mechanism, a network of misinformation that in a new media era can get churned out there constantly. We dealt with this when I was first running for the US Senate. We dealt with it when we were first running for the Presidency," he said.

Obama said that he won the Senate seat in Illinois despite some people saying I couldn't win as US Senator because I had a funny name.

"And yet, we ended up winning that Senate seat in Illinois because I trusted in the American people's capacity to get beyond all this nonsense and focus on is this somebody who cares about me and cares about my family and has a vision for the future?" Obama said, adding he will always put his money on the American people.

"And I am not going to be worrying too much about whatever rumours are floating on out there. If I spend all my time chasing after that then I wouldn't get much done," the President noted.

Conspiracy theories about the citizenship of Barack Obama are ideas that reject the legitimacy of the United States citizenship of President Barack Obama or his eligibility to be President of the United States. Some of these conspiracy theories allege that Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and that his birth certificate is a forgery.

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