A few gentle reminders:
1) Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and is a U.S. citizen.
2) Even if he weren't born in Hawaii, his mother was a U.S. citizen, which makes him a U.S. citizen. That would be true even if he was born in Kenya, or Indonesia, or beamed down from Planet Zorf. Which he wasn't.
3) We rightly ridicule Andrew Sullivan for the wild-ass theories he progagates about Sarah Palin's son Trig. We stare in disbelief at the spectacle of those who believe 9-11 was some sort of inside job. We marvel and scoff at the cottage industry that continues to surround the assassination of John F. Kennedy, nearly 50 years on. We do these things for good reason. And yet some of our putative friends throw all that common sense out the window, because they wish to believe conspiracy theories that are more in line with fan fiction than reality.
4) You can, I think, believe that Barack Obama's presidency is dunderheaded, inept, mendacious, intellectually vacant and morally bankrupt. You can mention with confidence the notion that he has surrounded himself with knaves, mountebanks, thugs and brown nosers. You can describe his performance in office as that of a dilettante (ahem), a malingerer and someone who is aloof to the point of catatonia. Even if all of these assertions are accurate, his presidency is not illegitimate. Barack Obama won the election in 2008, decisively. He is the President of the United States. So can we give this birther crap a rest, please?
Thank you. And have a totally bitchin' weekend!
20 comments:
One might say that he is a legitimately terrible president. That said, I wish him well for the next year and a half until a responsible adult who has studied things like economics and history takes over.
That's where I am on the matter, too, WBP.
I believe that Barack Obama's presidency is dunderheaded, inept, mendacious, intellectually vacant and morally bankrupt. You can mention with confidence the notion that he has surrounded himself with knaves, mountebanks, thugs and brown nosers. You can describe his performance in office as that of a dilettante (ahem), a malingerer and someone who is aloof to the point of catatonia.
I had often wondered whether Barak Obama is his own man or simply a shill for the Uber-Lefties with dark agendas such as Soros. The more I watch and see, the more I'm starting to realize that he really has a lot in common with Greg Brady. Greg got to be Johnny Bravo because "he fit the suit." That deer in the headlights look we sometimes see when Barak gets away from the teleprompter, and his little temper tantrums when called out are starting to make me feel that Obama, like Brady, fits the suit.
The one reason I still hold out a vague hope that the birthers are right is that, if so, every act of B.O. becomes illegal, null and void. Obamacare gone, appointments gone, regulations and rulings and executive orders gone. It would be easier than legislatively reversing all of this crap, especially after another 18 months of it.
i wonder how much of this nonsense is fueled by the fact tha he has a 'non american' name?
what if he was born to a kenyan women and american man with the name Robert Donald Thatcher?
i'm starting to see this birther stuff as veiled racism. he's not 'one of us' because he's got a 'one of them' names.
would an american son born to an immigrant, and named Gino, have the same issues if he were elected?
or does he have to be black first?
It is impossible to land any corporate executive job without a detailed background check. You can not get a job at Microsoft, Google, or IBM without a stringent background check and proof of citizenship. Yet we know virtually nothing about our president’s background. Real Americans have open and transparent college records, passports, and work history files - but we have elected a president who has sealed all his records.
Asking 0bama to show his records and prove his background does not make one extreme, or crazy, or a lunatic. It does not even make one a “birther.” It only means we expect that ALL candidates for higher office, as all do for any other high level job, should produce proof of citizenship and detailed records concerning their background.
This is just common sense.
I'm convinced Obama's minions in the MSM are giving a platform to the birthers in an attempt to paint them as mainstream Republicans. In fact, the Obama administration has said that controversy will be a liability for the GOP in 2012, of which I vehemently disagree. It's the lack of viable candidates which will be the biggest detriment.
"Real Americans have open and transparent college records, passports, and work history files"
i dont. does that make me an unreal american?
anon, i hereby assign you the label of 'whackjob'.
dont hide behind bullshit and a nonidentity. if its racism, own it.
and be man enough to sign your name when spewing...
Gino,
Blogger just ate a longer response to your comment, but let me just say this.
1) In most cases I have a pretty good idea who my anonymous commenters are, based on writing style. I'm pretty sure I know who wrote that post and I can vouch for that individual, even if I disagree with some of the message. And if the commenter is who I believe it is, he is not racially motivated.
2) My point is that the birth certificate thing is wrong in itself, because Barack Obama meets the Constitutional eligibility requirements, regardless of where he was born. The evidence is overwhelming he was born in Hawaii, but it's not especially interesting to me.
3) Anon's point about academic transcripts and the like is a different, more interesting issue. I agree that Obama was under no requirement to release that information, but nearly every other recent president, and most candidates, have done so. I know rather a lot about George W. Bush's academic record as well as the academic records of John Kerry, Al Gore, John McCain and Sarah Palin. I know nothing about Obama's record. I'm not entitled to know his record, but it speaks to a larger question -- the amount of scrutiny and vetting Obama got before he was elected. I'd submit it wasn't much.
I'm not convinced it would have been decisive if we knew things about Obama's past that were negative, because his greatest fortune was that he ran against terrible candidates. He may have won anyway, but we'll never know.
I could care less about the birth certificate. That's not important. What I would like to see are 0bama's other hidden documents - the ones he has hired an army of lawyers to keep sealed. Such as 0bama's work history at the Chicago firm where he never filed a case or motion alone. Where he does not have one single legal opinion. Little unusual for a former "Harvard law review president," and former "professor" no?
Trump (who will never win and does not want the nomination) has figured this out....he's a business man. He knows what the consumer wants. Real Americans have open and transparent college records. Real Americans suspect that where there is smoke, there likely is a fire.
Now if it's 0bama's birth certificate Trump wants to see, why doesn't 0bama produce it and destroy Trump’s "political" career? 0bama could easily put Trump to shame, but 0bama refuses to answer.
Every day the White House refuses to answer, it appears more and more like they have something to hide. To real Americans, Trump appears more and more credible - check the "non-biased" Daily Beast/CNN poll showing Trump within 3 points of 0bama - while 0bama continually comes across as a charlatan.
You know, instead of simply asserting that he's a legitimate President, why not hunt down the law that establishes that anyone born of a U.S. citizen is a natural born citizen? I certainly remember being told in school--well before anyone really cared about who Barack Obama was--that children born overseas were not automatically eligible for the Presidency.
In addition, liberals did challenge John McCain's eligibility because he was born in the Panama Canal zone, not in a region officially a U.S. state or territory. So I think there is some wiggle room for bithers here.
I can't envision why a young lady would give up U.S. medical care to give birth in Kenya or even Canada at that time, or for that matter that airlines would even allow a greatly pregnant woman to fly in those days. But that conceded, the man has spent millions avoiding the release of basic documents like this. There has to be a good reason.
My hunch; it would show him to be a complete fraud. Not ineligible by birth, but ineligible by being a complete con man.
But that conceded, the man has spent millions avoiding the release of basic documents like this. There has to be a good reason.
My hunch; it would show him to be a complete fraud. Not ineligible by birth, but ineligible by being a complete con man.
We won't need old documents to establish that the man is a fraud this time around, BB.
Gino, no offense, but you just fell for the same game as the liberals do by playing the race card. You actually do all of us on the right a huge favor by preparing us for this on-coming "your all racist" onslaught. This mantra grows tiresome.
I'm not the anonymous who typed the comment that drew your ire, and I could personally care less about the "birther" issue. What's going to happen at this point, if something can be proven: NOTHING.
The topic on which we should draw focus is the total incompetency of this presidency on so many issues. I do agree that the Trump flirtation with candidacy is merely an attempt by the left to get everyone to take their eye off of the ball (the economy, foreign policy, etc) and focus on the absured. In the long run, what's really absurd is Trump's combover.
The birth certificate issue is tiresome, and I suspect it hurts the Right more than it discredits Obama, who's record the past few years is much more relevant and damning than any record from 40+ years ago.
I think that interest in the subject, however, isn't rooted in racism as much as in the disquieting sense that we've been played. Politics is a cynical business and has become more about marketing than substance; a trick of getting the candidate to appear as a mirror where the voter's own projections cause him to see what he wants to see (all lies and jest, still a man hears what he wants to hear and discregards the rest). The "smoke" coming from this current mirror is the sense that the Obama candicacy and presidency represents the most cynical and clinical demonstration of this technique ever. I can hear the political equivalents of Professor Higgins and Colonel Pickering placing a wager on whether one can truly take a nothing and pass it off as a something.
My own wager is that everyone knows deep down they've been conned; some are angry about it and want to undo it, others are too embarrassed to admit it so they deny just as vociferously. The ensuing conflagration puts out even more smoke to serve the illusion. Meanwhile, reality bleeds to death from a thousand cuts.
"he's got a 'one of them' names."
Barry Soetoro changed his own name to “Barrack Hussein Obama." We know that Barry Soetoro finished high school in Hawaii as Barry Soetoro then attended the Occidental college as Barry Soetoro. Here, by his own admission he says he did lots of drugs and flunked out. After dropping out of Occidental, Barry showed up in New York, homeless and on drugs - again Barry Soetoro's own admission. I wonder why Soetoro began using the name "0bama" while in N.Y.? He had some reason for assuming a new name. And how likely is it that a drug addicted college dropout would breeze into Harvard where typical LSAT scores are in the 98-99 percentile, and GPA's average 3.8 - 4.0?
"We won't need old documents to establish that the man is a fraud this time around, BB."
True, but isn't it scary that the guy's approval ratings haven't already dropped into the teens or less? There is a scary reality that a large portion of the electorate does not seem to be paying attention to what is going on.
There is a scary reality that a large portion of the electorate does not seem to be paying attention to what is going on.
I understand why, though. Many people would prefer not to think about politics. Hell, I would prefer not to myself. But because we live in a thoroughly politicized world, I feel that I have to pay attention and raise my voice. You do, too, BB. Some people just don't care, some don't want to think through the implications of it all.
It's not that they aren't paying attention.
There IS a certain percentage of the populace
- and it's higher than you may think at around 27% - that agree with 0bama's radical ideology of "transforming" America into a socialist state.
Please don't be fooled into believing that if only ever American knew of and understood 0bama's anti-American agenda everyone would be against it. Some people are very much in favor of everything (and more) 0bama is doing.
"You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." Abe Lincoln
Because 27% of the people do not need any fooling at all.
It seems difficult to please anyone on the issue of Obama's birth. I wrote this post: http://friendlyneighborhoodrepublican.blogspot.com/2011/04/i-thought-issues-of-obamas-birth.html on my blog, and as a result of that and an extremely similar discussion on facebook with some "friends," I am incredibly confused. One person on CBC called me a socialist-communist-democrat because he felt my views were too liberal. My "friends" eviscerated me and called Obama a "victim," and I quote, "as if his skirt was too short," an analogy I found repugnant. Apparently our president is quite the victim in the eyes of some liberals. He's a victim of "innuendo, gossip, accusations, and silence." And I also learned from these progressives that President Bush was completely shielded from all negativity from his "people" so he wasn't a victim like poor Obama. Will the stupidity ever end?
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