August 02, 2009 04:08 PM UTC
A rational look at 'birtherism'.
42 Comments- by: Laughing Boy
Andrew McCarthy over at NRO had a fantastic essay that might shed a little light on the single, kos-sponsored poll that seems to empower the left into proclaiming that a majority of Republicans are out in left conspiracy-land (never mind the 9/11 conspiracy beliefs of Dems that had similar numbers believing that Bush knew or weren’t sure about the attack).
He starts off about where our discussions here have settled over the last week (JeffcoBlue’s random bits of bile excluded):
[Emphasis thoughout mine]
The editorial desire to put to rest the “Obama was born in Kenya” canard is justifiable. The overwhelming evidence is that Obama was born an American citizen on Aug. 4, 1961, which almost certainly makes him constitutionally eligible to hold his office. I say “almost certainly” because Obama, as we shall see, presents complex dual-citizenship issues. For now, let’s just stick with what’s indisputable: He was also born a Kenyan citizen. In theory, that could raise a question about whether he qualifies as a “natural born” American – an uncharted constitutional concept.
The mission of National Review has always included keeping the Right honest, which includes debunking crackpot conspiracy theories. The theory that Obama was born in Kenya, that he was smuggled into the U.S., and that his parents somehow hoodwinked Hawaiian authorities into falsely certifying his birth in Oahu, is crazy stuff. Even Obama’s dual Kenyan citizenship is of dubious materiality: It is a function of foreign law, involving no action on his part (to think otherwise, you’d have to conclude that if Yemen passed a law tomorrow saying, “All Americans – except, of course, Jews – are hereby awarded Yemeni citizenship,” only Jewish Americans could henceforth run for president). In any event, even if you were of a mind to indulge the Kenyan-birth fantasy, stop, count to ten, and think: Hillary Clinton. Is there any chance on God’s green earth that, if Obama were not qualified to be president, the Clinton machine would have failed to get that information out?
Here’s the issue that’s enabling the ‘birthers’:
To summarize: What Obama has made available is a Hawaiian “certification of live birth” (emphasis added), not a birth certificate (or what the state calls a “certificate of live birth”). The certification form provides a short, very general attestation of a few facts about the person’s birth: name and sex of the newborn; date and time of birth; city or town of birth, along with the name of the Hawaiian island and the county; the mother’s maiden name and race; the father’s name and race; and the date the certification was filed. This certification is not the same thing as the certificate, which is what I believe we were referring to in the editorial as “the state records that are used to generate birth certificates [sic] when they are requested.”
To the contrary, “the state records” are the certificate. They are used to generate the more limited birth certifications on request. As the Jeffers post shows, these state records are far more detailed. They include, for example, the name of the hospital, institution, or street address where the birth occurred; the full name, age, birthplace, race, and occupation of each parent; the mother’s residential address (and whether that address is within the city or town of birth); the signature of at least one parent (or “informant”) attesting to the accuracy of the information provided; the identity and signature of an attending physician (or other “attendant”) who certifies the occurrence of a live birth at the time and place specified; and the identity and signature of the local registrar who filed the birth record.
Plainly, this is different (additional) information from what is included in the certification. Yet, our editorial says that “several state officials have confirmed that the information in permanent state records is identical to that on the president’s birth certificate [by which we clearly meant ‘certification’],” and that the “director of Hawaii’s health department and the registrar of records each has personally verified that the information on Obama’s birth certificate [i.e., certification] is identical to that in the state’s records, the so-called vault copy.” (Italics mine.)
That misses the point. The information in the certification may be identical as far as it goes to what’s in the complete state records, but there are evidently many more details in the state records than are set forth in the certification. Contrary to the editors’ description, those who want to see the full state record – the certificate or the so-called “vault copy” – are not on a wild-goose chase for a “secondary document cloaked in darkness.” That confuses their motives (which vary) with what they’ve actually requested (which is entirely reasonable). Regardless of why people may want to see the vault copy, what’s been requested is a primary document that is materially more detailed than what Obama has thus far provided.
And some of what he’s provided is simply fiction:
Before January 20 of this year, Barack Obama had a negligible public record. He burst onto the national scene what seemed like five minutes before his election to the presidency: a first-term U.S. senator who actually served less than four years in that post – after a short time as a state legislator, some shadowy years as a “community organizer,” and scholastic terms at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard that remain shrouded in mystery. The primary qualification supporters offered for Obama’s candidacy was his compelling life story, as packaged in 850 pages’ worth of the not one but two autobiographies this seemingly unaccomplished candidate had written by the age of 45.
Yet we now know that this life story is chock full of fiction. Typical and disturbing, to take just one example, is the entirely fabricated account in Dreams from My Father of Obama’s first job after college:
Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool. They treated me like a son, those black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day. . . . The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors – see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand – and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve. . . .
As the website Sweetness & Light details, this is bunk. Obama did not work at “a consulting house to multinational corporations”; it was, a then-colleague of his has related, “a small company that published newsletters on international business.” He wasn’t the only black man in the company, and he didn’t have an office, have a secretary, wear a suit and tie on the job, or conduct “interviews” with “Japanese financiers or German bond traders” – he was a junior copyeditor.
What’s unnerving about this is that it is so gratuitous. It would have made no difference to anyone curious about Obama’s life that he, like most of us, took a ho-hum entry-level job to establish himself. But Obama lies about the small things, the inconsequential things, just as he does about the important ones – depending on what he is trying to accomplish at any given time.
But then he gets to the crux of the matter.
But we should know. The point has little to do with whether Obama was born in Hawaii. I’m quite confident that he was. The issue is: What is the true personal history of the man who has been sold to us based on nothing but his personal history? On that issue, Obama has demonstrated himself to be an unreliable source and, sadly, we can’t trust the media to get to the bottom of it. What’s wrong with saying, to a president who promised unprecedented “transparency”: Give us all the raw data and we’ll figure it out for ourselves?
Again, I agree fully with McCarthy – I’m sure Obama was born in Hawaii and is an American citizen. I don’t have any desire to litigate the ‘natural born’ aspect of the Constitutional requirement for President.
But I think some inconsistencies already demonstrated are enough to make many want to get more details about his past – details that shouldn’t be this difficult to coax out of someone who ran for office pledging the most transparent administration ‘evah’.
Hey, LB! Don’t believe the “birther” drivel you say, over and over again – then you link to this? Oh my God, LB, you’re not just a birther, you’re a Crypto-Birther!
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/…
This is an attempt to appeal to “rational” people, like you, LB, who still have enough unthinking hatred in you that somewhere in there you want the “BC issue” to be real – or at least do some collateral damage. You like the fact that it’s being discussed even as you feel the need to disclaim it. “Almost certainly eligible?” Fuck you and the subtext you rode in on. It’s amazing you don’t think people can see right through that.
Do you really expect people to take seriously an author who declares “Obama has consistently misled the public about his personal history” on the basis of one blog disagreeing about one job description on his resume? This is – really, I want this recorded – this is what you call a “rational look?”
And yeah, bullshit like this is why you earn my “bile,” thanks for the mention. You’re no different from any other troll, you’re just better at the affectations of not being a troll.
I’d love to see him have damage from information released if it relates to things he simply made up.
I think the ‘almost certainly’ line is in relation to Constitutional scholars debating the ‘natural born’ piece of it, and I’m not interested in it. He’s the President, and he’s my President, even though I find many of his actions unsettling to the point where I now regret supporting him.
Ok, how about this – from the same story:
There is a gathering body of evidence that his life story might be a little different than he has portrayed it to weasel votes from different factions.
To the “bile” comment, I challenge you to go back through your comments and find the ratio of ones that contain personal insults to the ones that don’t. It gets old, and you don’t seem to bring much to the table other than being an ass to a number of different people. I stand by it.
the you and you or sometimes you in your sig line.
We all seem to annoy one another with our sig lines from time to time, don’t we? 🙂
What’s important is to live to fight another day – I’ll be back later with some comments for LB that are sure to annoy him, too. Mondays are very busy for me.
I just wish you could make your point without being rude. I stop reading at the insults, so I miss a lot of what you have to say.
This time, when I realized you were posting more disingenuous crap that’s supposed to be the “thinking man’s position” on today’s wingnut canard (actually the same canard with a few big words thrown in), I responded instead of not reading. But most of what you post does not rise to the level of needing to be refuted politely.
Dude, you’re probably a nice guy who would be fun to have a beer and shoot the shit with, but that is not why you posted this. You posted this because you are a wingnut who excuses subtly racist conjecture about the eligibility of the President to serve. Combine that with your Stay-Hard for Sarah Palin and you’re basically the perfect target, all the more so because you imagine you’re not.
I wish I had the time to research all of what Obama actually said or wrote and all of which this writer claims. For arguments sake let’s say the writer is correct.
There is NOT ONE person on the national level whose bio has been told 100% correctly. The most famous being Camelot. The whole Kennedy Story is completely false. But let’s talk closer to home, John McCain and Sarah Palin.
McCain was no hero; he was a less than average midshipmen whose Admiral dad pulled strings so that he could graduate. He was not hero in war; he endangered the lives of his fellow sailors by not following orders and ended up as a POW for stupidity.
Palin, not even worth the blog time to talk about all the inconsistencies.
GW Bush – his whole life is a myth and cover up. Once again not worth the time here this morning.
The Bill and Hillary story is a great piece of American fiction.
My point is not “they all do it, so what”, my point is even if what you say is true, so what? Where he met his wife, his first job? Are those things important? (Side bar: Every time I have had the pleasure of being near him and Michelle, they have told the story of meeting at work. So, I am not sure what fact you are quoting.)
But that is my point. Famous people write their bios to suit the public’s demand for a great fairytale. Powerful White people have done it since the dawn of this great nation. The story of the Mayflower and pilgrims is America’s biggest lie. Ask any Native American Tribal Chief. I had the pleasure of sitting next to the Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation on a flight to DC about 20 years ago. The conversation was fascinating!
I find it amusing that White America is having fits about America’s First Black powerbase using the same tactics that you all have used forever.
George Orwell came to the same conclusion about war and the telling of victory.
SO, LB, get your panties out of twist. We have a new Black Power base and that base will make the most out of their power and influence, in the same our White teachers have for years. It is simply a case of the student becoming the teacher.
LB, this is the system that has been in effect since hieroglyphics were written. Powerful people will tell their story in the way it most benefits them. The issue with White America is for the first time they don’t like story.
So what, deal with it. I am sure Pharaoh didn’t like the “Story of Moses” either.
But where in my post did I say anything about race?
I have never seen so many issues on the truth of biography or birth right behind Kennedy, Carter, Nixon, Bush 1, Bush 2, or Clinton as we have on Obama.
Am I overly sensitive, yes, I am. Does all of this come down to race, for me, yes it does. The Birther argument is just stupid and racially loaded. With Rush and Beck spuing hatred and the White male Senators spuing reverse racism about our High Court nominee, yes, my history forces this to be about race for me.
And you are right from your stand point it may not be about race, for me, that is all I can make of this. Very sad on my part.
Rachel Maddow says it better.
I share your conviction that race is driving a lot of this. But it’s more complex than that. This is our first president who wasn’t born to two natural-born Americans if I understand it (excluding the early presidents, of course, who were born British subjects).
It’s all bullshit, though, and besides race, the fact that we’re talking about a LIBERAL DEMOCRAT (cue horrified shrieks) is fueling a lot of this too. I recall all the bile, all the hate aimed at the Clintons during the 90s, and for a man who was rather moderate too; it was so irrational, so unsettling at times that I’m certain a lot of it is repeating itself here. A lot of these kooks would do the same thing if Obama was white and had a Swedish father.
That sort of hyperbolic accusations didn’t happen at all over the past 8 years….
The vast majority of charges against Bush were accurate, and were about specific POLICIES Bush initiated and carried out, while the charges against Clinton and Obama are all personal because hard right mouth breathers can’t pin anything on their policies. (And I’m not speaking about policies you merely disagree with, like health care and the bailouts, but ineptly executed policies like invading Iraq.)
9/11 Truthers and Dan Rather’s “Fake but Accurate” memos.
I sure didn’t see pickups with bumper stickers about that everywhere I went, as opposed to all the anti-Clinton stuff.
There was plenty of testimony about Bush’s Air Force Reserves service that supports what the fake memo said. So yeah, it was accurate.
It’s called framing a guilty man.
Same as Mark Furman with OJ.
There’s little doubt uncle awol earned his moniker, but the memos were indeed flawed.
But I believe Hoover’s mother was born in Canada.
http://www.nps.gov/heho/histor…
Picard(‘s writers) and Orwell were rather cribbing off of Napoleon (who was probably cribbing of Machiavelli). But that’s neither here nor there.
I just read this in it’s entirety.
You were, as I am not, able to put this red obsession perfectly in context.
Thanks.
in much the same way my mother was an anti-Semite. She would try to get me to read “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and I’d show her all the debunking of it, and she’d say, “Well, why don’t you keep an open mind? Why don’t you at least read it? I’m not saying it’s true, but there are these sorts of questions.”
So I read it, and I pointed out personally things that clearly made it seem false to me. Still, she’d say, “But don’t you agree it COULD be true?”
At some point just engaging the birthers seriously becomes equivalent to joining their movement.
For a less personal example, look at the John Birch guys calling Dwight Eisenhower a Communist agent. If you say, “Well of course he’s not a Communist agent, but why hasn’t he released all the records of international phone calls to see if he talked to the Russians? Of course he’s not on their payroll, but why don’t we get his family’s financial records just to be sure?” That legitimizes the accusation and is a form of gaining their support.
Conservatives of the past were a hell of a lot braver than this current crowd in denouncing such conspiracy theory nonsense.
LB picked a poor essay (crypto-birther is a good name for its author) to make his point, which is about some inconsistencies in Obama’s personal record. But I believe LB is fully and unconditionally believes in Obama’s natural citizenship as the rest of us do.
My own opinion is that these inconsistencies aren’t enough to raise my eyebrows. It’s par for the course with political biography. Notify me when a real Obama scandal occurs.
LB, calling this “a rational look at birtherism” was not the best title, unless JeffcoBlue and sxp151 are more on target than I am.
This is the final refuge of the reds.
The only way to deligitimize the President is to convince people he’s not one of us. This birther thing’s bullshit, LB knows it, and only LB knows why he’s running this con. And he’s not about to tell us.
The essay’s a laugher. The President has done nothing to warrant this. Hawaii says he’s a natural born American citizen. His mom, an American from Kansas, was in Hawaii when he was born. Nothing is out of order except the assholes that continue to perpetuate this myth.
The very fact you continue this proves even marginally mainstream repubs are hanging by a thread, hoping for anything to get out of the Presidency.
The birther movement parallels the last days of the 3rd reich, when Goebbels, Himmler, Borman, and Hitler were running around the Berlin bunker, quoting the horoscope that said FDR’s death was a signal that Germany would win the war.
Grow up.
How does that jive with this?
And this?
It doesn’t.
I’ll say it again:
I’m sure he’s an American citizen and is completely qualified to be President as far as the citizenship requirements go.
My interest in this story is that obviously, there is information that he hasn’t authorized release of regarding his birth. That information in my opinion will give people enough to go on to contradict some of Obama’s most repeated personal stories and rationales for his philosophies.
It would be election gold. And that’s my reason for hoping the pressure (albeit from a small group of lunatics) continues to ruffle his, and all of your feathers, and hopefully will lead to him having to be more forthcoming in his incredibly transparent (snicker) administration.
Look at the responses. None dispute his fabrications in his personal story, or the fact that it would lead some rational people to be curious about what exactly he’s telling the truth about and what he isn’t.
The responses liken me to a Nazi, a racist, attack George W. Bush over some cocaine thing that’s certainly irrelevant at this point.
How about somebody, knowing full well why I want more to come out (I’m admittedly partisan and now want to beat Obama in the next election) and not because I’m someone trying to claim these outlandish theories, give me a good reason why this story causes so many knee-jerk reactions rather than a rational rebuttal of the points made?
As McCarthy said in the article – when did information suddenly become a bad thing?
I really hope you understand that when introduced into the mainstream conversation, the farther out there a conspiracy is, the more of a distraction from meaningful conversation it is.
This economy and what this totally unsustainable culture is a ticking time bomb. The more we waste time, straining for a strand to discredit this presidency (which is utterly shocking considering the 2000 and 2004 elections. Where the FUCK were these “lunatics” then?), the more we fail to deal with the bigger problems.
because they’re you’re base. Thanks for being a bit more open about it than NRO.
There’s plenty of rational rebuttal to the story as a whole. There’s no rational rebuttal to the points people continually make after that, for two reasons:
1) the people who actually believe that stuff are completely insane and cannot be convinced with logic;
2) the people who cynically manipulate the crazies (like yourself and McCarthy) get a thrill out of it and won’t listen to reason because that would take all the fun out of it.
I’m just glad I don’t belong to a political party that depends on people like the 9/11 truthers for votes. I think I’d feel a little dirty if I did.
The only thing you said that even marginally makes sense was that you’re admittedly partisan…….that anything, no matter how screwball or made up or phony it is, is ok as long as it serves as a catalyst for President Obama’s defeat in ’12.
The end justifies the means mentality that republicans in power, out of power, typical on the street partisan as well as ulra-goober republicans have deluded themselves into embracing ever since ollie north disgraced his uniform late 80’s, the October surprise treason reagan perpetrated prior to the 1980 election, the Vince Foster caper, the manufactured “outrage” over Waco (admittedly this would be mothers milk for white conservatives, as white conservative extreme right wing christian separatist, government hating lunatics were involved, and somehow were lionized as victims, even after they murdered the Federal Agent to start the melee), the shamefull Tommy Franks episode, with the future CEO of “Franks LLC” folding like a cheap suit and allowing field marshall von rumsfeld to fuck up the Iraq invasion, and now, “There’s something sinister about President Obama’s birth” kanard.
What is this obsession, LB? Is this a real life birth switching like in the Gregory Peck/Lee Remick film of 1976 “The omen”? Or “Rosemary’s Baby”?
There’s something on some mysterious, as yet unidentified document that some yet to be identified sinister foriegn agent planted, that predicted this “manchurian candidate” would be programmed to grow up hating whites (even though his mom and gramma were white), would hoodwink millions in this country and around the world, and destroy the planet by crafting legislation that medically insures every American?
Like I said, at least you don’t give a shit what scam works, or how bullshit the con is. You just want it to work.
Gordon Liddy must be so proud.
My problem with Obama are his policies, which I disagree with.
The true ‘birthers’ are idiots, but I think they have a fair chance of uncovering some idiotic move Obama might have made in the past that will really hurt him come election time.
You can keep trying to put words in my mouth about ‘Manchurian Candidates’ and some crazy racist theories, but I demonstrably am not a part of crap like that.
I’m a rational, civil person most of the time. Maybe all this need to pigeonhole people as “crazies” says more about the one making the accusation than it does the accused.
McCarthy’s point is that this birther thing is much more about Obama’s overall honesty than about some crazy deluded theory that he’s not a U.S. citizen, and I think it’s a great point.
Did you read the article?
Again, it’s not about me.
The point is, no matter what con, ruse, or deception comes forth, it’s ok with you if it leads to President Obama’s defeat.
No amount of changing the subject will mask the fact that you prefer ideology over country.
Pigeonholing? You did that to yourself.
I simply prefer a different ideology because I think it’s better for my country.
I think that it’s a little hypocritical of you to say something like that after two wars and a hurricane were freely used as political pawns the last eight years. I don’t blame or judge about that, it’s just the nature of the beast, don’t you think?
People objected to one of the wars quite a lot, while the President used political techniques to make it happen anyway. Trying to end the war was therefore a political issue.
The failure of the government during the hurricane was also a political issue, involving people dying due to official policies.
Pretending that Obama’s birthplace is still in question is not a political issue that affects people’s lives or that people would otherwise care about. It’s a game to you, because you and your gang can’t win on the actual issues. So you need the nutjobs to help provide a distraction from them.
It’s cynical and it’s sad.
that George W. Bush perpetrated a fiction about his cocaine bust, we get to cancel everything he did as president? Is that your point?
If we don’t have a day-by-day accounting of Bush’s life during the entire period in which the cocaine bust may have happened, notarized of course, then the only reasonable assumption is that Bush is actually Pablo Escobar.
makes it seem like a joke.
But it isn’t, and that’s funny.
..since St. Elmo’s Fire. The NRO is such a joke anymore….
But, as far as the war goes, it was a rigged deck from the get.
shooter shaped the facts around the agenda. Said to the NYT Niger had yellow cake. Then told Russert the NYT said Niger had yellow cake. Gave rigged intel to Britain, said Britain gave said intel to us.
And I know nervous nelly/sissy dem’s (small “d” in their cases) enabled shooter enormously. And General Powell’s role was regretable. He’s a good man that will take a tragic miscalculation to his grave.
Katrina was heartbreaking, bush simply never got it. The Pull yourself up by your bootstraps white conserve crowd ( the who gives a shit about New Orleans, we got ours crowd) leaned hard, and that ideology drove his reactions. The fact bush never cared about anybody but “his base” is undeniable.
Not fodder, just the way it was.
According to the State of Hawaii (Obama: True and False, quoting the Honolulu Star-Bulletin), there is no ‘long form’ birth certificate.
What everyone has already seen is all the state offers.
Although I by no means expect this shit to die off any time soon. “Election gold”, true or false.
The big difference between this kanard and the swiftboat ’04 scam is simply that there is an opposing side to hit back and hit back hard.
If Kerry had had this type of support, calling the swiftboaters exactly what they were…….frauds to a man…..and had the swiftboaters been kicked to the curb, mocked and derided like they deserved to be, the election most likely would have taken a different turn.
Crazy world that has the draft dodger portrayed as a tough guy and the recipient of multiple Purple Hearts and a Silver Star as a weakling.
Red world 2004.
A challenge. Go to the Public Records website of the state in which you were born and request a copy of your birth certificate. Then post what you get. I dare you. I doubledare you.