Is our President a liar or not? Does he occupy the highest office in the land legally, or should he be impeached and removed? The consequences of the answers are large, but the questions themselves are simple enough.
The situation is analogous to this: Obama is driving 15 miles over the speed limit in his convertible. A cop pulls him over and asks for his driver’s license. He hands him a photocopy of a driver’s license, with a face like his, but unclear. The actual Driver’s License number has been whited out.
The cop, understandably, demands more verification. Obama smiles at him, and hands him the phone number of a top DMV official, tells him to call her. He does, and she confirms that Obama is in fact a licensed driver. “Can you tell me his Driver’s License number, so I can run him for warrants and status?” “No”, he is told, “but he is certainly legitimate.”
Obama drives off without asking permission. The cop stands there confused for a few moments. A State official has vouched for him, but the evidence he has provided does not come close to what would be demanded of an average citizen, and he has no way of knowing if that official is simply protecting a political patron in exchange for a favor, or for partisan political reasons. He has no idea if Obama is even licensed to drive, with certainty, since he has no independent way of verifying the claims made.
He goes back to his office to try and pull the original driver’s license and is told by his supervisor he’s nuts, since the evidence is plainly complete. The cop scratches his head, realizes something is going on, finishes his other work, goes home to have a beer, and watches a basketball game.
This is where we are today, except that the next day the cop made another effort, and was told he was nuts once again for his efforts. Is asking of Obama the same thing asked of everyone else nuts? Why? How?
When new people get hired at ANY company, their Driver’s License and usually Social Security card get photocopied for the records. Mine always have been. If a contract–say with the government–included legal language that “natural born birth to be verified prior to employment”, then they would be. I deal with large contracts and large companies, and they leave no detail unaddressed.
This situation is farcical, and in my view anyone who is NOT a “birther” needs to have their heads examined. The task is not to get Obama disqualified; the task is to show how thoroughly and inexcusably our political-media complex screwed up on this fundamental and reasonable request: that Obama provide the same basic elements of identity verification required by relevant laws, in this case proving “natural born” status to a degree acceptable in a neutral and competent court of law.
Unless we believe his paternal grandmother is nuts, then he was probably born in Kenya, his COLB submitted some time in the next year in Hawaii, and a birth announcement released within a month or so of his birth. We can’t even be sure what exact day he was born on. Even if the COLB provided is valid–and if it is why can’t we look at it, and why are identifying marks like serial numbers missing–that still would have been paperwork generated on the basis of believing the word of the parents when they filed for it.
His father spent his life agitating for Communism in Kenya, dying a drunk, broken man when the Kenyan people rejected him; his mother spent her life in Indonesia, working to improve their lives. Neither of his parents seem to have liked America very much. Neither did any of the other adults who raised him until he headed for California.
Our Founders were not stupid, and regardless of their other political differences–and they were sundry, well expressed, and deeply principled–would have been unanimous in their disdain for the mental febrility which enables the reasonable to be trumpeted as lunatic, and common sense to become a sign of extremism.
6 replies on “The Identity controversy”
It doesn't matter if Obama were born outside the US, his mother was a US citizen, therefore he is a US citizen per US Code Section 1401, part g.
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode08/usc_sec_08_00001401—-000-.html
From a moral standpoint, if he were born outside the US, that makes him a liar, correct? I define a liar as someone who knows one thing is true, but insists on the truth of another.
If you want to claim that "natural born citizen" includes people born in other nations, to foreign nationals, then I have to say that that is simply not a circumstance that has ever arisen in American history, and that there is NO case law to deal with it.
Clearly, the intent of our Founders was to prevent someone with divided or even treasonous loyalties from taking hold of the most powerful office our Constitution offered.
Beyond any reasonable doubt Obama has failed to prove his citizenship. To claim otherwise is to plead, in this case, an unwarranted and ignoble ignorance.
Again, my goal is not to get Obama "decertified" as a candidate, although it is likely warranted. My enemy is the so-called "Mainstream media", which has failed here completely, as have the jackasses in Congress.
I believe that he is tellIn the truth that he as born in the US.
I never said he was born to foreign nationals, his mother was American his father, I believe, was a British citizen. I haven't done the search but I'm willing to bet that situation has case law attached.
While you're of course allowed to have the opinion that Obama is not able to office, I'd have to disagree. Even if he wasn't born in Hawaii, he can still hold the office based on code 1401. So, that part of you argument is null.
Who are you defining as the mainstream media? Msnbc? Abcnews? Fox? Even Bill O'Reilly has said that he was born in Hawaii–while he isn't part of the actual Fox news, that's still something.
How could there be case law attached to the Constitutional definition, for the American President, of "natural born"? No President in our history has ever been both born outside this nation, and to one parent who was a foreign national.
Regardless, what has been provided would not stand in any court of law, if presented by either of us. It is commonly known that no verification was done on those requesting Certificates of Live Birth, making it useless as a legal document. The testimony of the person overseeing the records might be admitted, provided it was offered under oath. This has not however happened. There have been no hearings, of the sort, for example, that illegal aliens–or those suspected of being illegal aliens–undergo daily in courts around this country.
This skirts around the issue, in any event, of why a document most of us have in our drawers cannot simply be produced. I can guarantee that anyone who wants to work for the FBI, Secret Service, or CIA who was born in Hawaii gets their long form certificate pulled. This form is much harder to forge, and among other things shows the hospital where the child was born, the doctor who delivered it, and in my case at least my actual footprints.
As things stand, we have a picture of a photocopy from which all serial numbers have been deleted, and which has not been examined–cannot be examined–by any document specialists who are not approved by those supposedly holding the form.
We further have the testimony not offered under oath in a court of law of a Democratic functionary from Hawaii.
Whether he was born in Hawaii or not, it is clear the media failure has been nearly complete. Bill O'Reilly is wrong to suggest this issue has been resolved.
This is the simple question: could what he has provided get him hired by the FBI? Of course not. Yet he runs the FBI.
This situation is an affront to common sense. That is what bothers me the most. It is bad enough that people lie, but far worse when people ignore it because they are being bullied.
I am a Birther and proud of it. By this I do not mean that I think Obama will be impeached or not allowed to run again. What I want to see happen is the media shamed into admitting they were either openly agitating for Obama, against all professional ethical obligations; or that they failed in their professional duties to see beyond the very thin veil erected by Obama's handlers.
It seems obvious to me his loyalties are not first and foremost to this nation: he is an internationalist, who in my view shares his father's Communist sympathies, and who is trying to set up the structures needed to impose tyranny and revoke the protections offered by our Constitution.
You are likely unable to conceive that anyone could seriously work towards that goal. If you are a typical American you grew up in a sanitized, safe, comfortable place, with ample access to strip malls, movies, music, housing and at least some income.
This is not the circumstance of most of the world. Hundreds of millions of people died violently in the last century, and hundreds of thousands of our troops.
They did not fight for the lot of us to be stupid, and barter away our birthright for a piece of moldy bread.
Big lies start with small lies. This is a small lie. The big lie is that Obama wishes most Americans well.
With regards to the case law, I meant that other citizens have been in the same situation as Obama in terms of having one US citizen and one foreign national parent.
And given US Code 1401 states that the exact hypothetical situation your describing regarding Obama's birth (born in another country, brought back to the US) is still considered to be a "citizen of the United States at birth"
On the matter of the driver's license–since he had a passport at one point in his life (when he traveled in college), it seems likely to me that he had to present them with a COLB.
Natural born citizen, and citizen are two different things.
Self evidently, everyone who is a citizen now had parents at some point who were foreign born.
As I said, his citizenship is not in question. What is in question is whether or not he is "natural born". As I said, the intent was to prevent divided loyalties. This is a very reasonable and prudent precaution.
In a nation this large, it should not be so difficult to find a qualified candidate that we must accept people born in other nations to non-American parents.
As things stand, it seems self-evident that our President does not care for the British very much, no doubt due to his loyalty to his Kenyan father. This is not in the best interests of our nation. That should be clear enough.