Note To Andy McCarthy: It Doesn’t Matter Where Barack Obama Was Born
Hey dude. It wouldn’t matter if he were born in Hawaii or in Indonesia or even somewhere in Africa. If his mother was an American citizen–and I don’t think there’s any doubt she was–then he would be a natural-born citizen and eligible to be President. Which is also an argument for why the “natural born” requirement of the Constitution is archaically silly: someone who was born in Canada of Canadian parents who moved here at the age of 2 or 3 cannot be President (like Michigan’s Governor Granholm), but, someone born outside the United States and who lived outside the U.S. until their 18th birthday could still be President if at least one of their parents was an American citizen.
John McCain was born in Panama, by the way, which was never a state. The fact that Panama was U.S. military territory at the time isn’t actually what makes that irrelevant, either; it’s the fact that both his parents were Americans, so he could easily have been born in Japan, Germany, the UK, Korea, or anywhere else and he’d still be eligible.
This is a non-issue unless you can prove that his mother wasn’t a citizen. Otherwise the only thing they could be “covering up” would be some theoretical event where his parents forged a birth certificate for obscure and basically pointless reasons and Obama’s campaign is still covering it up for no particularly good reason.
Sorry guys, you’re working way too hard on this one. They’re probably “stonewalling” because they have better things to do than conduct an in-depth investigation of 47 year old birth records they probably had to ask his mom for in the first place.
*Update*: Okay, I remain as skeptical about this as I am of those who suggest Dick Cheney shouldn’t have been able to be Vice President because he switched his residency to Wyoming at the last minute in 2000, but, it turns out that the question is more complicated than I thought, and his mom’s being a citizen probably wouldn’t pass muster. I very much doubt that this is going to turn into anything significant, but I would agree: if it’s something Obama didn’t even know about, it would be tragic. It would I suppose be criminal if he did know, but that seems so unlikely it’s ridiculous. It would indicate that he’d been hiding this information his whole life, and his mother and grandparents as well, just because they all thought he might one day run for President–you don’t need to be born in the U.S. to be a Senator or Congressman, let alone an Illinois elected official. Anyway, this all seems so damned unlikely I’m not exactly holding my breath waiting for the “big news” to break.
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Obsession over Senator Obama’s birth certificate is a good indicator of ODS. I disagree with his policies — or at least what his policies were before he went all over the map — but the ODS offends me almost as much.
It doesn’t seem to me that Mr. McCarthy is working on this at all, just asking if there’s anything to it.
There may be, I can’t say. I do know there’s a lot of arcana related to qualifications based on nationality and geography, some of which came about post-WWII and was designed specifically to exclude persons foreign-born [to soldiers] which might argue against the very point you’re making now.
And, with the lack of vetting already in evidence with regard to Obama, I really wouldn’t be surprised all that much if he turns out disqualified on that basis.
WRT “obsession”: I don’t think I’ve seen anyone obsessed about it, but O could clear it up in a trice if he wanted. Why not do so?
That’s my puzzlement. Producing a valid birth certificate should be a simple task, either by providing one already in his possession, or requesting a new copy from the state of Hawaii.
I just can’t figure out why he’s not doing that and putting all the speculation to rest, unless he’s purposefully holding out in the hope of allowing some of his detractors to make themselves look stupid.
Boyd’s last blog post..Music and me
WRT “obsession”: I don’t think I’ve seen anyone obsessed about it, but O could clear it up in a trice if he wanted. Why not do so?
That is the only argument on this topic that I find at all persuasive; but as Dean points out, maybe they’re busy with other things. Or maybe they don’t want to draw attention to and dignify an issue that’s only a concern to a tiny fringe who will never support the Senator anyway. (Of course, Senator Kerry took that tactic with the Swift Boat Vets, so it ain’t necessarily smart.) If it were me, I would spend five minutes clearing it up — mocking it, even — and then ignoring it. That Senator Obama hasn’t done so means something, but it could simply mean he’s too foolish or arrogant to bother.
But these reasons from Dean’s link in the update?
Where is the embossed seal and the registrar’s signature? [Required for validity]
Comparing it to other Hawaii birth certificates, the color shade is different.
Isn’t the date stamp bleeding through [in reverse] the back of the document [image] "June [6] 2007?" (Odd since it was supposedly released in June 2008.)
There’s no crease from being folded and mailed. [Hawaii requires printing and mailing, according to Okubo. Electronic images are never released, she assured us, nor are they valid.]
Those could all be artifacts of pressing in a book for four decades and of the scanning process. I’m not persuaded. And this:
It’s clearly Photoshopped and a wholesale fraud.
That’s not an argument, it’s a conclusion, not (yet) supported. These days, if you put any image online for public comment, somebody’s gonna declare it Photoshopped. It’s like people want to be the next Charles Johnson.
I just can’t figure out why he’s not doing that and putting all the speculation to rest, unless he’s purposefully holding out in the hope of allowing some of his detractors to make themselves look stupid.
Heh. I never considered that possibility, Boyd. That would be a pretty smart tactic.
I don’t think "arrogant" or "foolish" apply quite yet. I am reminded of a moment in the documentary on the Clinton campaign–I think it was called "War Room" but I don’t remember for sure–which documented the real life Clinton campaign as it happened in 1992, from early on until the victory. I’m sure the makers were ecstatic that they happened to be in on the start of the winning campaign like that. It was fascinating to watch George Stephanopoulous, James Carville, and other well-known figures from that era, before most of them were famous. Anyway, at one point, on camera, we see someone (Stephanopoulous?) take a phone call from someone purportedly from the Perot campaign, threatening to go public with the "information" that Clinton had an illegitimate half-black baby that he was covering up. Team Clinton basically said, "go ahead and publish that information, we dare you," laughed, and hung up the phone with contempt.
I don’t think that was arrogant or foolish. I think it was a perfectly appropriate "fuck you, we have better things to do you idiot" response.
All the speculation on this one, so far, is pretty tiny. It may be better to cooperate and make it go away, but that’s often a judgment call, because they’re going to be dealing daily with silly issues that they can’t afford to spend time on what with everyone important in the campaign likely running ragged on 80-120 hour work weeks. Even taking five minutes out to find some underling to go track this down is just another unwanted distraction, probably, because they hear crap like this all the time. "Now he wasn’t born in Hawaii? Bite me, come back when you have something important to bother me with" would be my guess as to what his top aides would even say to this.
That would be true of the McCain camp too, or just about anyone in a campaign of this scope.
>>All the speculation on this one, so far, is pretty tiny.
Which goes to show there’s little in the way of ODS about it.
But then again, if there are people who think 9-11 was a huge conspiracy I’ve little doubt there are some who think Obama and his crew conspired to ignore the law in order to get him elected.
And, really, who knows at this point? Stopped clocks and such. Maybe Hillary is going to break the news at Denver, Michelle will return to being embarrassed about the US, and etc etc.
Dean, arrogant and foolish would only apply (in my opinion) if the allegations were true and substantive, and yet the campaign ignored them. At this point, I see no reason to believe any of that. I just acknowledge the remote possibility.
I should also add that I was wrong in presuming decades of pressing in a book: the fact that this certificate was typed means it’s a recent reissue, since a 1961 original would’ve been hand-written. Details — and a pretty thorough debunking of the whole matter — here.
I don’t think anyone is really "obsessing" over this. It seems to me like a tit-for-tat over the fact that someone on his side called into question John McCain’s citizenship because he just happened to have been born on a military base in the Panama Canal zone, (American territory at the time), to military parents - both of whom were citizens.
It’s a non-issue really.
I see plenty of obsession. Not here, because Dean’s World is populated by (mostly) reasonable people. And some reliably anti-Democrat sites like Little Green Footballs, Hot Air, and even World Net Daily have given prominent play to the debunking.
But try your search engine, and you’ll see lots of credulous hits for some of the more fever-swampish spots on the right. And not just minor bloggers, but some larger players like Free Republic, American Thinker, and NRO. (To their credit, NRO has reported but mostly dismissed the rumors. Free Republic, also to their, credit, seems to have as many debunkers as believers.)
Plus there are also some die-hard Clinton supporters who seem to cling desperately to this rumor. A live.com search for Obama "birth certificate" yields 231,000 hits.
And I can’t recall which radio show it was, because I changed the channel as soon as it came up; but come up it did on some nationally syndicated show in the last couple of weeks. It almost had to be Neil Boortz, because his is the only national show on locally in the a.m. drive, and that’s when it happened. Mr. Boortz is so full of ODS that he’s passed beyond caricature.
ODS ?????????????????????????
Obama Derangement Syndrome: the mostly-right equivalent of the mostly-left Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS). As much as I dislike Senator Obama’s policies, I dislike some of his opponents a whole lot more. They’re every bit as irrational as the Bush-haters.
And up until this weekend, I practically never heard about the Senator’s birth certificate without there being a lot of spittle and lunacy on the part of the speaker.
"Hey dude. It wouldn’t matter if he were born in Hawaii or in Indonesia or even somewhere in Africa. If his mother was an American citizen–and I don’t think there’s any doubt she was–then he would be a natural-born citizen and eligible to be President."
Don’t remember where I read this but at the time of Obama’s birth if a child was born outside the U.S. one of the parent’s had to have been a U.S resident for at least five years after the age of 16 for the child to be a natural born citizen. His mother, being 18 at the time, did not meet this requirement.
That said I doubt he was born anyplace other than Hawaii. This alleged scandal looks like it started as payback for the equivalent story about McCain and has been latched onto by some bloggers who think they can duplicate Rathergate. Sort of like so many reporters play the gotcha game imagining themselves as the next Woodward and Bernstein.
Maggie: Look at some of the fever swamps of the right where they can’t stop accusing Obama of being a secret Muslim, can’t get enough of obsessing over his middle name, etc. So far we haven’t seen the worst of it, but I expect it to get worse by November, and worse still if he wins. This appears to be a pattern in politics: some people just go batshit insane at whoever wins.
Agmartin: The update I posted indicates that yes, technically, if she’d been outside the US then maybe he wouldn’t have been natural-born. I regret even bringing it up, this is still just so silly.
I have worked in government/public employment most of my adult life, and I design a good number of these sorts of forms for the institutions I’ve worked for (how’s that for an appeal to authority, not!).
I think this whole thing is a stupid sideshow. The dude has a damned passport for cripes sake, he’s had to prove citizenship to get that, so people need to get over it. Frankly a US passport is WAY more secure as a form of identification than a birth certificate, and that is one of the reasons birth certs are no longer accepted for entry into the united states.
The Kos image is almost certainly a scan of a valid copy. The seal is there, if faint, and this is easily explained by it being mailed — these embossments often get flattened quite successfully in modern mail processing machines.
My guess as to the difference between the decosta cert and Obama is the digitizing of the form. The decosta form is likly a ‘transition’ period form where they were moving from old style forms to full digital forms. It was most likely printed by laser printer on form stock (where the ‘form image’ was already printed on the paper) and the Obama form is likely ‘full digital’ where the whole form, sans the security paper, is printed. I bet if I went back and examined some of the digital forms I’ve designed over the years, I’d find some overlaps on the corners. Those mean jack shit.
There however, is one TECHNICALITY (mentioned above) that is argued to invalidate his citizenship. In 1961,in order to be a citizen, you had to have one parent who was a resident of a state for 5 years over the age of 16 (Obama’s mother was 18 or 19 at the time of his birth). However, if I remember correctly the 1986 revision of that law seems to have made the 1986 guidelines retroactive to 1952, so this appears to be a technicality that would only be won if someone were to take it to USSC, and I don’t see that one happening, or even being entertained by the court if it was (I could be wrong)
Frankly I think this is a stupid road to travel down, though. I utterly dislike Obama. I think he’d be TOTALLY the wrong direction for this country. I’d vote for hillary before him, and I think hillary is a little bit less than dirt, and that’s saying something.
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