Birther archeology can be fascinating. Phil Berg apparently included the myth about the Indonesian adoption in his early lawsuits. Do you think he made it up on his own, or do you think he picked it up off the web?
Berg picked most of his stuff off the web. Heck, on that subject, Berg just outright cited online rumor in his complaint:
"26. ...Additionally, there is rumor circulating on the Internet that his Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, adopted Obama."
It's hard to say whether that's better or worse than what he did four paragraphs earlier, where he cited to an online hoax birth certificate that was signed by 'Dudley Doright' and 'John Kennedy.' Which is more ridiculous: citing rumor or citing an obvious hoax?
And since this one bit of Birther archaeology seems to have attracted some interest in proving my claim wrong, I think it would be a good idea to refresh everyone as to just what my claim actually was.
The EARLIEST I’ve found that argument showing up at FreeRepublic was in this November 19, 2008 thread. A Leo Donofrio thread, naturally. But that was pretty much just one poster saying that mid-thread, with some follow-up discussion about it. It wasn’t until December that the argument started gaining traction at FR. Here, for instance, is a December 4 thread that helped to spread it. And do you notice who isn’t invoked in the first several pages of that thread? Vattel. Vattel’s name didn’t start making the rounds until later. Again, you’ll notice, by the same poster, who apparently discovered Vattel in the interim days. Only then did the argument start to snowball and pick up adherents.Heck, start with June 2008, and you’ll see that posters were talking Obama’s eligibility for five full months before they started claiming that ‘natural born citizen’ requires two citizen parents. Before they started citing to Vattel. Like curiosity said, only after the election actually took place did that argument take off. And there was no reason NOT to make it, if it was a legitimate and widely accepted position. We've always known Obama's father wasn't a US citizen. And yet it wasn't until after election day that people began widely arguing that that lack of US citizenship was an absolute disqualification.
(And lest the issue be confused, 'natural born citizenship requires two citizen parents' is a different argument than 'natural born citizens cannot be born with dual citizenship.' A child can be either one without necessarily being the other. One concerns the child's citizenship, the other concerns the child's parents' citizenships. And if the matter was as simple and straightforward and obvious as 'he's disqualified because of his father's citizenship', you'd think someone would actually say that in the two years before the election. But they didn't.)...
And hey, if you actually find it being discussed earlier, let me know. Post the links, like I’ve done above. I’ve looked and I can’t find anything, but I won’t ignore links to actual, dated discussions that I’ve missed. It’s not like FR scrubbed all the threads that would contradict me. (Heck, I'd be interested in isolated instances that *didn't* lead to discussions like you say, and were just ignored or dismissed as wrong by other posters.)
So two things:
First, like I said above, I'm talking about one particular discrete eligibility argument. Not that Obama is ineligible because he was born outside the US. Not that he's ineligible because his mother was too young. Not that he's ineligible because he was adopted. Not that he's ineligible because he was born with dual citizenship. No, I'm talking about the assertion that the President must have two citizen parents.
Second, as I make clear in the final paragraph above, what I'm really talking about is discussions of this argument. Everyone seems interested in looking for random, isolated posts, and that's great and I'm interested in seeing any hits. Heck, it's possible that a prior mention could have been what inspired Leo Donofrio. He didn't cite any historical or legal authority for the claim in his pleadings, after all, and like I mentioned in a previous post, Berg borrowed most of his material from things he read online.
The web, and even FreeRepublic, is a large sprawling place, and I'm not adamantly concluding that no single person EVER posited this argument before November 2008. (I mean, I could probably find one person who claimed online that Obama was ineligible because he's black, or because he's an alien reptoid. Lone individuals can have wrong ideas that don't take off.)
I'm claiming that if it was made, that it wasn't taken seriously even by the birther community. It was ignored as wrongheaded, or actively rebutted as incorrect. No eligibility threads were started where posters agreed that the two-citizen-parent definition was right. Only in November 2008 did people do a 180 and start believing it, repeating it, preaching it, and suddenly claiming that they'd learned from childhood that the President needed two citizen parents.