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Birther Nonsense

While I’m not a fan of Stand Up! with Pete Dominick on Sirius XM, he’s always good to get the center-left angle on politics.  In addition, I’m a self-diagnosed politics junkie who was stuck in the wonderful Beltway traffic so I guess you can say I didn’t have a choice in the matter.  Pete’s guest, John Avalon, made a critical point today stating how significant Mitt Romney’s nomination really is to American politics.  He is the first Mormon to be nominated by a major party and the first non-protestant to be nominated by Republicans.  This comes after Mitt’s pervasive hammering surrounding his not so stellar conservative credentials.  The base may have been skeptical about him, but in the end, they choose him over the other clowns who vied for the Republican nomination. However, the mainstream media is not pushing that narrative.  Instead, they’re focused on Donald Trump’s birther nonsense.

Now, I know we should all focus on the economy and other key issues in this upcoming election, but this birther issue does get under my skin.  First of all, it’s beyond absurd.   Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and is a “natural born citizen” who is eligible for the presidency.  Even Andrew Breitbart thought this whole charade was a losing issue.  No one cares! No one cares because the narrative these people are trying to push is not grounded in reality.  It is something akin to an Alex Jones “theory”, who feels that al-Qaeda is an arm of the U.S. intelligence network, or a person who has watched Three Days of the Condor, The Manchurian Candidate, and The Parallax View one too many times.  No doubt shady stuff occurs in Washington, but birthers are so ludicrous it makes me want to hug them in empathy.

My first taste in blogging was for Western Journalism, which reports heavily on the subject.  I cannot bash the folks at Western Journalism too much, since some of them are very professional and cordial, but as the months progressed; I found myself unable to be associated with an organization that peddles, excuse me, this gross propaganda concerning Obama’s eligibility.  It’s been three years folks.  If you haven’t been able to convince the base, the heavyweights in the conservative media, and the American people, you probably don’t have the “explosive find” which you regard as the holy grail of political malfeasance.

Furthermore, like liberals, birthers get agitated, petulant, and downright nasty when people dismiss them and their ideas.  It is a temper tantrum on steroids. An excerpt from a piece on Western Journalism detailed the open letter Breitbart’s Senior Staff released surrounding their legitimate vetting of Obama which, needless to say, didn’t bode well with this writer.

Andrew Breitbart was never a ‘Birther,’ and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of ‘Birtherism.’”

Reading this makes me want to ask in bemused wonder:  How old are you?  (I could, of course, ask the same question of Anderson Cooper, Bill O’Reilly, Mark Levine, Neal Boortz, or Glenn Beck – who are clearly much older to a man.)  But seriously, how immature – or insecure, at least – must one be to be so concerned with what the cultural elites think of them?  Young Ben Shapiro (twenty-eight, and reportedly the youngest nationally syndicated writer in the country) went to Harvard Law. One wonders if he had been president of the Law Review if we would have ever seen one of his publications…but I digress.  Joel Pollak…sure enough, went to both Harvard and Harvard Law – just as I had expected.

While I must congratulate the two on emerging from that milieu with any non-collectivist values, it seems that neither of them escaped with a penchant for identifying and confronting the Alinsky staple of marginalization…or, they accept the practice so fully that they simply can’t bear the thought of being on the receiving end thereof.  Well, grow up, boys!  If what Media Matters says about you is a concern (and it clearly is), then perhaps you should choose another line of work.

I think someone misplaced their pacifier.

The real comical element about this whole movement is that there is no concrete legal definition of the term “natural born citizen.”  They have no cornerstone.  I’ve always thought that the term applied to any citizens born on American soil.  Indeed, I would stand corrected. Byron York wrote a great piece in The Washington Examiner since the rude resurrection of this issue thanks to Donald Trump, who Geogre Will aptly called a bloviated ignoramus last Sunday.  York wrote:

The Constitution specifies that a president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States, but it does not define the term. The Supreme Court has never clarified the issue, but there is a law, 8 U.S. Code 1401, that spells out in detail who is a citizen.

The law uses the phrase “citizens of the United States at birth” and lists categories of people who fit that description.

First, there are people born inside the United States. No question about that; their citizenship is established by the 14th Amendment.

Then there are the people who are born outside the United States to parents who are both American citizens, provided one of them has lived in the U.S. for any period of time. And then there are the people who are born outside the United States to one parent who is a U.S. citizen and the other who is an alien, provided the citizen parent lived in the United States or its possessions for at least five years, at least two of them after age 14.

Since they are all “citizens of the United States at birth,” the question is, does that also mean they are “natural born citizens” in the constitutional sense?

Birthers believe a natural born citizen is a person born to two parents who were citizens of the United States at the time.  Hence, the reason why birthers have Marco Rubio, the crown prince of the Tea Party movement, in their crosshairs if he should ever be chosen as Romney’s running mate.

Well, according to Theodore Olson, Bush’s former solicitor general:

“My conclusion would be that if you are a citizen as a consequence of your birth, that’s a natural-born citizen…[Olsen] defended John McCain in a 2008 lawsuit alleging McCain was ineligible to be president. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 while his father served in the U.S. Navy there. Even though the area was under American jurisdiction and both McCain’s parents were U.S. citizens, some Democrats alleged McCain was ineligible to be president. McCain won the case, if not the presidency.

The law is really quite lenient, especially for those born outside the United States. If a child were born today in, say, Kenya, to a Kenyan father and an American citizen mother who had lived in the United States for at least five years, at least two of them over the age of 14 — that child would be a “citizen of the United States by birth” and be eligible for the White House.

However, this hasn’t stopped people like Joseph Farah of World Net Daily, who vociferously pushes the birther issue and has gone on record to say Rubio is ineligible for the VP slot due to his parents not being citizens at the time.  Washington lawyer Matthew McGill, who York cites in his column, states  “I am not aware of anyone who has contended that someone could be born in the United States and be a citizen by virtue of the 14th Amendment and nevertheless still not be a natural-born American citizen…if he is born in the United States, his parentage is not of consequence.”  No to mention that there is incontrovertible proof that Rubio was born in Miami, Florida.

In the words of John Adams, “facts are stubborn things.” Barack Obama is eligible for president, he is the president, and now we must focus all of our efforts in voting him out of office come November.  We have no time to theorize absurd notions about the “origins of his birth.”  This is time to get serious about the fate of our republic and our economy and we have zero time for sophomoric conspiracy theories whose footnote page is no longer than a kindergartner’s book report.  However, this is a free country.  You have every right to keep your opinions, no matter how insane, but I intend, along with other serious conservatives, to do everything possible in order to restore honor and dignity to the White House.  It’s game time and birthers have come unprepared.  They’re still coming down from their Paxil binge.

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Matt Vespa

I'm a staunch Republican and a politics junkie who was recently the Executive Director for the Dauphin County Republican Committee in Harrisburg. Before that, I interned with the Republican Party of Pennsylvania in the summer of 2011 and Mary Pat Christie, First Lady of NJ, within the Office of the Governor of NJ in 2010. I was responsible for updating his personal contact list. My first political internship was with Tom Kean Jr's. U.S. Senate campaign in 2006.

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2 Comments

  1. You call the birth certificate issue nonsense and say Obama was born in this country but what evidence do you have to support that view? The birth certificate he produced has been shown to be a forgery.

    1. Did you read the article. Check the quote by Theodore Olsen. The reasoning is sound. Now if you can prove that Stanley Ann Dunham is not his mother…

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