Question to Birthers about Grandma Dunham's Alleged Fraud

One of the reasons birthers demand to see Obama's long-form birth certificate (as opposed to the short form already released) is that only the long-form lists the hospital.

Why is the hospital important? Well, birthers claim that if his birth was registered as having taken place at home, then it opens up the possibility that his birth was registered fraudulantly. That is, if he were born in Kenya, his grandma could have gone down to the local registrar, committed perjury by swearing she whitnessed his birth at home in Hawaii, and obtained a birth certificate saying he was born in Hawaii.

Now why would Grandma Dunham do such a thing? Well, birthers say in order to secure US citizenship for her grandson. They correctly point out that Mama Obama was too young to pass on US citizenship to her son automatically had he been born abroad. Therefore, birthers argue, to make sure Bambi got the benefits of US citizenship, Granny risked her freedom and career and committed perjury on his behalf.

There's a gaping hole in this story which birthers have yet to address: the fraud was unnecessary.

While it's true Obama would not be born a US citizen had be been born in Kenya, under section 101 and Title II section 205 of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, in effect at the time, as the minor child of a US citizen, Obama was entitled to a non-quota immigrant visa to enter the US.

Once back in the states, under Title III, section 322 Bambi would be eligible for natuarlization.

So you see, even if Obama were born in Kenya, it was possible to secure his citizenship through perfectly legal means. And no, it was not uncertain because the law explicitly presumed a child of "tender years" would be of good moral character. There were simply no grounds under the law to deny him citizenship once his mother petitioned for it on his behalf.

Yes, it probably would have taken some time for the government to precess the paperwork, maybe a couple years, but who cares? While waiting, Barry would be a permanent resident living in Hawaii with his mom, eligible for virtually all the rights and benefits that go with US citizenship.

So help me out, birthers. If there was no need to fraudulantly register Bambi's birth in Hawaii, what was Grandma Dunham's motive?

A few birthers have said it was to avoid the hassle of naturalization. Okay, let's take that as given.

So Stanely drops Barry in Kenya and sends a wire to grandma, who goes to the local registrar and, after committing perjury, gets a US birth certificate for her grandson. She then sends it to her daughter Kenya by whatever expensive means were available at the time. Great. Now what?

How does that help little Barry? He's still in Kenya and has no papers that would get him admitted to the US. A birth certificate doesn't help. He needs a passport or visa. He can't use the birth certificate for that, either, because a child born in the USA needs to apply for his passport before leaving the country, not afterward. Attempting to use it for this purpose at the US consolate in Kenya would have triggered an investigation and likely uncovered granny's fraud.

So tell me, birthers, what exactly did Grandma Dunham accomplish by committing perjury?

Now compare that to the legal way. Stanley drops litttle barry. She takes her passport and his birth certificate to the US consolate, and obtains a Declaration of Birth of a Child to a US Citizen Abroad. With that document she can get him a non-quota immigrant visa and enter the US without any trouble.

One of the reasons birthers demand to see Obama's long-form birth certificate (as opposed to the short form already released)

One of the things you're missing is that he hasn't released anything. He posted a jpeg image (or maybe two or more different jpeg images) on the internet. One cannot obtain a Passport with a jpeg image. If he really wants to release this so-called short form then he can authorize Hawaii to sell certified copies of it to whoever is interested. But he hasn't.

I don't even think the Birth Certificate is relevant since he has effectively admitted that he is the son of a man who was never a US citizen, and thus is not a natural born citizen under the Constitution.

But the fact that he doesn't want to reveal anything about his past make me curious about what he is hiding. I don't think a man who has a past he wishes to hide should be President of the United States.

ML/NJ

You can make fun of people who come up with ideas about what it is he’s hiding, but the fault lies with the fact that he has erased his paper trail.

Bingo.

The circumstances suggest that he was born in Hawaii, but the biggest doubt is caused by Obama himself, by the fact that Obama and his allies have so strenuously resisted in dozens of court cases having to actually show it.

He is also a hypocrite. As a law school instructor, Obama famously claimed the Constitution should be interpreted very loosely in order to empower powerless people and to challenge the powerful.

But here he is, relying on the narrowest of technicalities, the doctrine of Constitutional "standing," which says essentially that powerless, ordinary people do not have the right to challenge the most powerful person in the country on the question of whether he has violated the express provisions of the Constitution in obtaining his present position, because the ordinary people challenging him do not have any injury different from that sustained by other ordinary people.

My own take is that he is fighting the birth certificate disclosure for fear of a "crack in the dam" and that it is his other records which would be most damaging.

In particular, I wonder how a mediocre high school student who went to a mediocre college in California was able to be admitted to Columbia University and then Harvard Law School.

I well remember those years in the university community and the initiative by many of the top American universities to become more "world class" institutions in part by expanding and broadening their base of foreign students, which policy for many of these institutions continues to this day.

At the time Lolo Soetoro adopted little Barry and the family settled in Indonesia, it appears that they intended to live there permanently. They didn't foresee that there would be marital problems and that at a later time Ann would want to send Barry back to the US to live with her parents. Barry almost certainly became an Indonesian citizen and probably got an Indonesian passport as a minor.

Later, after he had turned 18, I suspect that Barry (now calling himself Barack) realized that his Indonesian citizenship could allow him to obtain admission to a school like Columbia under their initiative to take more foreign students.

So, I suspect, he renewed his Indonesian passport, as an adult. He probably did not realize that under US law as in effect at the time, by doing this himself as an adult, he lost his US citizenship by operation of law, without anyone in the US State Department necessarily knowing anything about it.

Of course, the Indonesian government would have it in their records. That would be very valuable information for them to have. It would also be very valuable information to the Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis or any foreign government negotiating anything with the Obama administration.

There are good reasons why journalists, biographers, historians and just ordinary citizens should want to learn as much about our presidents as possible, and should insist that presidents be open and forthcoming about their lives.

The corrupt mainstream media appears to have taken the lapdog approach of simply relying on Obama's own book about himself for the facts of his life. And by having written his own book, Obama (and any ghostwriter) is able to control all of the facts that are selected to be presented about him and the manner of their presentation.

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