Less like this, please:
As a blogger filing for Huffington Post tracked down Republican House members, Reps. Cathy McMorris-Rogers and Dave Reichert, R-Wash., wouldn’t say whether they believe President Obama was born in the United States.
McMorris-Rogers fielded the question as she walked briskly up steps of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Advertisement“We’re all going to find out: Oh, I’d like to see the documents,” said McMorris-Rogers, a member of the House Republican leadership.
Is anyone doubting that Obama’s mother is a US citizen? No? Fine. Then he could have been born on Neptune, and still be a citizen.
Not that it changes the silliness of the birthers, but mere citizenship isn’t the Constitutional requirement for presidency. He’s gotta be natural-born. So if it turns out to be true that Nostradamus picked up Baby Barack in a UFO and flew him from a tiny Kenyan hospital to Hawaii when he was a few days old, then the birthers can fight another day.
I don’t like falling in with the birthers.
However, Mama HopeAndChange was only 16 at the time Mr. Obama was born. According to the law at the time, he has to be born on the soil, or live so long in the US while growing up (which he didn’t) to be “natural born”.
This was an issue with McCain’t as well. Mr. McCain was born in Panama, and the Senate had to debate before it voted that, because the area he was born in was a US base under treaty, it was US soil, and therefore John was a natural born citizen.
Considering that one grandmother says she saw Mr. Obama born in Kenya, there is evidence that he’s not natural born.
I just think it’s strange that I have to show my certified birth certificate to apply for most jobs, but Mr. Obama won’t release his to shut the right-wing nut jobs up.
Kentucky is right about the state of the law–it does matter whether Obama was born on Neptune. He also hits on probably the most frustrating part of the whole thing.
I’m satisfied that Obama was born in Hawaii because I recognize the State of Hawaii as controlling authority on the issue, but why do we have to rely on affidavits of people who have seen the birth certificate? Why can’t we just see the dang thing?
I don’t know what Obama is hiding (maybe it’s tactical–by allowing the birther controversy to continue, all his political foes fall under suspicion as nutters), but his refusal to release the document encourages the birthers.
Most importantly, it is outrageous that there is no system in place for establishing that the president elect is eligible to serve before the swearing in. This will come up again with future presidents and it will keep coming up until we change the process to comport with the constitution.
I think that no matter where you stand on the issue of whether he is or is not a “natural born” citizen (although, for the record, my answer would be damned close to Steve’s answer), arguing this is a waste of time. Let’s go after the issues and take him down from there–he’s been sworn in, he’s the President, and neither of those things is going away no matter how much some people ask to see the documentation.
There’s a lot of fighting left to do and you have to choose your battles. Choose a battle you can win–there are a lot of them around thanks to the incompetency of the Obama administration.
How about a compromise: the birther folks give a nod to Chief Justice Roberts, who swore in the good POTUS.
Mr. President, we’ll get off your naughty bits about the birth certificate, if you’ll be 100% transparent about all of the school records and thesis work.
Rather opaque for a fellow with nothing to hide, this President.
Jeez, KY, can you do a little research before you spout off? Barry’s mom was NOT 16 when she bore him, nor when she conceived him.
Ms. Dunham was born on Nov 29, 1942. Barry was born Aug 4, 1961. Do the math. She was 18 at that time.
As for “proof,” since when is hearsay proof? One grandma says she saw Barry born in Kenya? We have people who see Elvis all the time in this country. I’ll ask them both the same question: got any proof?
…And I’ve never had to show anyone my fracking birth certificate to get a job. Social Security card, yes.
tim, asking “Why can’t we see it?” means that you apparently aren’t familiar with Hawaii’s privacy laws. I’ve had a chance to read up on them while following this moronic excuse for a controversy, and they’re very restrictive. By my understanding, the only person who can allow other people to see the original is Barry himself. Why won’t he? Um, maybe because he’s gotten to the point of thinking “SCREW you!” to everyone who’s dumb enough to keep saying “Gee, Mr. President, we’re still not too sure where you were born.” He signed a form to get the copy released to shut up the birthers. I’ll bet money that anyone with a stake in this mess will turn around -given access to the original- and claim it’s faked or planted. Then they’ll ask for “real” proof; anything that let’s them keep the ball rolling.
If you’ve ever argued with one of those “moon hoax” idiots you have seen the same thing. No matter how efficiently you destroy their current argument, they always bounce back with, “yeah, but what about…”
smitty: who fracking CARES about his college work? Did he skip a class, or do you want to make him take extra credit?
Fortunately we have Stephen and zombyboy to keep us sane.
If you’ve ever argued with one of those “moon hoax” idiots you have seen the same thing. No matter how efficiently you destroy their current argument, they always bounce back with, “yeah, but what about…”
Made me laugh out loud. The birthers are just another stripe of conspiracy theorist. You can’t argue with them.
Eye on the ball people. Keep focusing on this natural born citizen B.S. and you’ll end up hit in the nads with nasty health care reform.
Oh, just to point to how silly this all is, only one lawyer in the entire country thinks this is worth pursuing. Ad if you’ve seen her on TV, well I think batshit crazy covers all the bases. Just. Wow.
Just for the sake of keeping the thread going, Casey, Hawaii’s privacy laws are utterly irrelevant to my post and this controversy. The constitution has a requirement. The burden of proof is on the candidate, not the nutters. During this election cycle we have come to find out that there is no procedure in place for ensuring the constitutional requirement is met.
This issue will come up again. And not just with Barry, but every time we elect a president with jet-setting parents. And it will keep coming up until congress adopts some procedure to verify eligibility.
Sane or not, Steve and Zombyboy are wrong on the law. I didn’t correct Kentucky on his 16 v. 18 mistake because that doesn’t make any difference either.
Actually, Tim, I don’t think I’m wrong on the law. I’ll let others decide my sanity. But here is the important bit: I believe that President Obama has provided the information required by law to prove his eligibility.
Perhaps, this will convince you since it comes from folks who don’t call themselves “zombyboy” (which, I admit, tarnishes my credibility at least a bit):
I was curious about the birth certificate question when I first heard it during the election. Every source that I turned to that I believe and trust to be reliable has said precisely the same thing: he has provided what he needed to provide. I don’t like the fact of his presidency, but my dislike doesn’t change the fact of his presidency.
Again, there are battles that we can win that will help keep this most “progressive” of presidents from enacting all of his agenda. And we must fight those battles. This question of his birth is just a sideshow.
Now, I’m going to put my entire a-ha discography on shuffle and let
Hey, what happened to the rest of my comment?
It was quite witty.
Ya can’t inflict US of A citizenship on yer poor Kenyan kid iffen you ARE UNDERAGE.
Sorry boys and girls, but that’s the law.
My own mother sometimes used to tell stories about “me” that were actually about my brother, and vice versa. If Granny’s recollection is the best the Birthers have, I’ll accept the documents that have been released re both Obama’s birth and Bush’s TANG service.
Obama’s story is pretty straightforward:
His mother Stanley met and married an African man who was already married, and 6 months later they had a son in Hawaii; a year later his father moved to Cambridge (apparently unaware of that city’s notoriously racist police department) where he was visited for a few months by his wife (Stanley, not the other one) and child before she moved back to Hawaii and filed for divorce.
Any physical resemblance between Obama and Frank Marshall Davis, a friend of his grandfather’s who is referred to as “Uncle Frank” in Obama’s book, and who wrote a book of his own in which he describes sleeping with a white teenager in Hawaii around 1960, is purely coincidental.
Something else find amusing is the birther’s insistence that there is something suspicious because they cannot view the so-called vault copy.
Let’s ignore for a moment that the vault copy is private information according to Hawaii law. If they honestly believe that the vault copy says something different than the official document issued by the State, then they must consequently believe that there are members at a high level of State government in on a vast conspiracy to protect Obama, of of whom one is the Republican Governor.
Yeah yeah. And 9/11 was an inside job ad we never lander on the Moon and Kennedy was assassinated by a complex cabal involving the military industrial complex, Castro, the CIA and the Mob. Must be fun to live in that world where you just know you’re right and you could save the world if people would just listen.
Wow. That ended up a lot longer than intended.
What I really want to see are Obama’s application materials for Columbia and Harvard, including his application “essay” for each school, and records of the subsequent school work and thesis. This inquiring mind wants to know if Obama ever identified himself/passed himself off as an African (Kenyan) or an Indonesian, either in his applications to these prestigious schools or subsequently at University. Just asking.
I was denied a passport not too many years ago because I only had one of those certificates of live birth
The explanation was that those can be filled out by anyone. In fact mine had been filled out by the midwife. A doctor hd signed it sometime later,I guess to attest that he believed I was who the certificate said I was.
At the very least I expect an apology and a beer for being discriminated against.
By the way the state had a birth certificate on file, they had just never sent the family a copy.
#15 – or there are people who think it’s so important to have a black President that no attacks against him, however legitimate, can be aired.
One such person was Obama’s Republican opponent.
I haven’t seen Obama’s college transcripts, or college thesis, or billing records from his law career. His state Senate records were tossed out, and records of his meetings for the Annenberg Challenge were put under lock and key by a supposedly public university (that was the $150 million boondoggle he worked on with Bill Ayers, who was described as “just an English professor from the neighborhood”, and then somebody Obama knew because his 10 year old kid and Ayers’ 27 year old son went to the same school, before they quietly admitted the two men cooperated for 2 years to disseminate a 9-figure sum to Chicago schools and Obama held a fundraiser in Ayers’ house).
Maybe there’s nothing interesting in any of those documents, or the birth certificate, or the off-the-record White House meetings for auto executives. Or maybe unnecessary secrecy won’t do the current President any more good than it did the last one.
Based on the information available regarding Obama’s qualifications, in a sane world he would be a day Laborer or Dishwasher. Both respectable occupations but short on Educational requirements.
Whoring for hits, eh Steve? Every time a Birther post shows up on HotAir, a 500+ comment thread is just about guaranteed to follow. Steve must be jealous.
ZB> no matter where you stand on the issue of whether he is or is not a “natural born” citizen … arguing this is a waste of time
Well, no. If you’re on the side of the skeptics, then it’s a question of significant impact. Suppose, just for the hell of it, that Obama is not a natural-born citizen. What are the ramifications of that? Is there any possible way you can argue that any of his acts as President are legitimate? Wouldn’t those acts become null and void? Would that not be a problem?
If you are skeptical of Obama’s eligibility, this is in fact a significant battle to fight, due to degree that it can discredit a lot of people in the Democratic party machine. There’s a lot of political hay to be made here. Whether you believe that’s good for the country depends upon what your definition of “good” is.
The privacy argument is a red herring. The essence of privacy isn’t secrecy, it’s control. Certainly, a person can voluntarily release information about himself. Also, when one pursues public office, there’s a de-facto surrender of some amount of privacy, which is, in fact voluntary as well, since nobody is holding a gun to anyone’s head and forcing them to run.
There is one way in which I can agree with you, ZB, as to how it isn’t an important argument to pursue. I have never had any expectation that Obama would fulfill his oath of office, to uphold the U.S. Constitution. So on that point alone, he’s failed in his duties. If this isn’t reason enough for him to not serve, then the rest seems almost irrelevant.
Parenthetically, I don’t see how it matters what the party affiliation of Hawaii’s governor is. Hawii is a left-leaning state. It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s governor was to the left of, e.g. Montana’s Democratic governor. So what?
As I’ve said in a few places I’ve posted on this topic, I was in a similar situation to Obama when I was born. My father was an American serviceman and my mother was English. The law of the US at the time was that a child of mixed-nationality parentage had dual citizenship with the country of the non-American parent.
In my case, British law was that I was solely an American; I would have needed an English father and an American mother for Britain to recognize dual citizenship. If Obama was actually born in Kenya, he would have had dual citizenship with Britain that was recognized by both nations, since his father was Kenyan.
Be that as it may, I had to legally renounce my (nonexistent) British citizenship before I could be admitted to the Naval Academy. If I had to do that, shouldn’t Obama, with actual dual citizenship, have had to do that?
I’m not primarily concerned with his birth certificate, although I think it may ultimately show things he doesn’t want shown. I’m more concerned with the passport he used to travel into Pakistan in 1981, when US citizens weren’t allowed to go there.
Casey,
You ask why anyone wants to see Obama’s college transcripts…one of the reasons is to learn whether he applied and got accepted and got any financial aid to these various schools as a “Foreign Student” — don’t you think that would be interesting to know?
I do! And so do many others out there…
Juliet16,
I’d also like to know how he did in Econ 101.
I haven’t seen the transcripts, but based on his postgrad stuff I’d say he failed.
I agree the most interesting stuff is the Occidental College, Columbia University, travel before, say, 1995 – IF any of that shows a claim of ‘foreign’ status or international travel on an Indonesian passport, then he probably never was a US citizen and isn’t now.
Actually, tim, Hawaii’s privacy are perfectly relevant. Why? Simple: can you tell me just where in the US civil code it explicitly requires that a candidate for national office (or the presidency) must present his or her original birth certificate to run for office? No certifications of live birth allowed, despite an other sort of legal utility. No interpretations, no auras or penumbras. I’m asking for a specific and explicit requirement which demands presentation of an original birth certificate before a candidate may run for, or win, national office.
Um, good luck on that.
The burden of proof is not on the candidate, unless you can provide specific language according to the above request.
zombyboy quotes NRO, but I guess they’re too “left-wing” for the “skeptics” these days.
Garrett: you forgot teh Gays; they were involved in killing Johnny too, weren’t they? {/snerk}
persiflage lives up to his name by his frivolous or flippant style, since only the frivolous would would demand public access to such private information. You think Barry “passed” himself as African? Fine, go dig up something called PROOF and maybe the sane world will listen to you.
Btenny: I feel your pain, and I’ll be glad to buy you a beer. Sometime. Like, you know, when I get out of this current recession/depression.
bgates just makes a fool of himself by making it about race. That’s the same kind of limp-dick, cheap-shot, “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” crap that Barry pulled during the 2008 campaign. But then, bgates proceeds to ignore the current thread by whinging about transcripts (Christ on a fracking crutch, what is it with you goobers and the man’s TRANSCRIPTS!?), but bgates ups the ante by mentioning billing records from his law career. That’s really pulling crap out of your buttocks, l’il bgates; yet more proof that the birthers will always have Yet One More Question, just as Garrett observed. Try establishing relevance next time, before you hurt yourself.
jed, on the other hand, is just an idiot without any sort of logical argument. Sure, jed, I can suppose Obama is not a natural-born citizen. I can suppose he’s really a Martian, or a Vulcan. I can suppose he’s an android. I can suppose you have a functioning brain. But all of these hypotheses require PROOF, something the birthers are (sadly) lacking.
You want to claim Barry was born somewhere else? Give us proof, not skepticism. Alas, the idiot birther movement has neither proof, nor facts, nor data which in any way support the claim that Barack Hussein Obama II was not born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961.
Let us look at the proof for that claim. First, there are the microfiche shots which show birth announcements for
in the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star Bulletin at the time of birth.
Second, we have the testimony of Barbara Nelson:
Of course, any dedicated birther will immediately discount Ms. Nelson’s testimony has false, perjured, or bribed. Lord forbid they do any real research to disprove said testimony.
Third, we have Director of the Hawaii State Department of Health Dr. Chiyome Fukino testifying that she has personally seen the original document as maintained by the great state of Hawaii. In other words, she has made a sworn statement that the original certificate exists. Birthers are obliged to explain just why the good doctor would perjure herself, and this does not extend to general expressions of “skepticism.” Again, the requirement of proof.
Fourth, we have the certification of live birth from Hawaii, stamped with the appropriate seal, etc. Again, birthers are obliged to provide genuine proof that this document is in some way false, considering that it is prima facie a valid document from the state of Hawaii.
Finally, we have the elemental fact that -despite the two newspaper ads, despite the personal testimony at the time, despite the testimony of officers of the great state of Hawaii, and despite official documents released by the great state of Hawaii- the truthers have advanced not one single fact to contradict this case. They have suppositions, hypotheses, questions, and “skepticism” aux merveilleux, but not one, single fact to their support.
I’m not holding my breath.
Not only that, but they believe the same officials who have lied and released a fake COLB while have some sort of roadside conversion, breakdown, and release the “real” incriminating long form.