Posted on 07/28/2009 5:29:21 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Pres. Barack Obama has a birthday coming up, a week from Tuesday. We hope he takes the day off—or even the whole week, the briefest of respites from his busy schedule of truncating our liberties while exhausting both the public coffers and our patience. The president’s birthday comes to mind because we recently spent some time looking at a photograph of his birth certificate, being held by Joe Miller of Factcheck.org, who took the time to examine it. President Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m, in Honolulu County, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. The serial number on his birth certificate is 010641. Baby Barack’s birth was not heralded, as some of his partisans have suggested, by a star in the east, but it was heralded by the Honolulu Star, as well as the Honolulu Advertiser, each of which published birth announcements for young Mr. Obama.
Much foolishness has become attached to the question of President Obama’s place of birth, and a few misguided souls among the Right have indulged it. The myth that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president represents the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of his election and presidency disappear. We are used to seeing conspiracy theories from the Left, for instance among the one in three Democrats who believe that 9/11 was an inside job conducted with the foreknowledge of the Bush administration. We’ve seen everything under the sun blamed on Dick Cheney and Halliburton, and Rosie O’Donnell has given us much mirth with her metallurgical expertise, while Andrew Sullivan has beclowned himself and tarnished the good name of The Atlantic with his investigation into the “real” parentage of Trig Palin. Most notable, the Iraq War summoned the craziness in a big way, and there are those who still shudder over their espressos at the mention of the Carlyle Group. And there is a fair amount of crossover between those fixated on Obama’s birth certificate and the 9/11 “truthers” — lawyer Phil Berg, for instance, is a player in both worlds. There is nothing that President Obama’s coterie would enjoy more than to see the responsible Right become a mirror image of the loopy Left circa 2003.
The birth-certificate business is not a uniquely conservative phenomenon; the allegation that Obama was born in Kenya seems to have originated with a Hillary Clinton supporter at a blog called The Blue State. Either way, this fantasy is not particularly widespread within the conservative movement, but it has attracted enough interest that it needs to be addressed.
The fundamental fiction is that Obama has refused to release his “real” birth certificate. This is untrue. The document that Obama has made available is the document that Hawaiian authorities issue when they are asked for a birth certificate. There is no secondary document cloaked in darkness, only the state records that are used to generate birth certificates when they are requested.
If one applies for a United States passport, the passport office will demand a birth certificate. It defines this as an official document bearing “your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.” The Hawaiian birth certificate President Obama has produced—the document is formally known as a “certificate of live birth”—bears that information. It has been inspected by reporters, and several state officials have confirmed that the information in permanent state records is identical to that on the president’s birth certificate—which is precisely what one expects, of course, since the state records are used to generate those documents when they are requested. In other words, what President Obama has produced is the “real” birth certificate of myth and lore. The director of Hawaii’s health department and the registrar of records each has personally verified that the information on Obama’s birth certificate is identical to that in the state’s records, the so-called vault copy. Given that fact, we are loath even to engage the fanciful notion that President Obama was born elsewhere, contrary to the information on his birth certificate, but we note for the record that his mother was a native of Kansas, whose residents have been citizens of the United States for a very long time, and whose children are citizens of the United States as well.
The attention paid to President Obama’s place of birth is not unprecedented. In fact, it may be the only thing President Obama has in common with Pres. Chester Arthur, whose opponents whispered that he had been born in Canada. A number of unsuccessful presidential candidates—George Romney, Barry Goldwater, and Lowell Weicker among them—actually were born outside of the United States (in Mexico, the Arizona Territory, and Paris, respectively) to American parents and thereby into American citizenship. If the conspiracy theorists have evidence that President Obama went through the naturalization process, let them show it. But there is no such evidence, because this theory is based on unreality, as two minutes’ examining the claims of its proponents reveals. The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that a lack of evidence for the theory is taken as yet more evidence for the theory. Indeed, the maddening thing about dealing with conspiracy hobbyists of this or any sort is the ever-shifting nature of their argument and their alleged evidence: Never mind the birth certificate, his step-grandmother said he was born in Kenya! (No, she didn’t.)
One of the unfortunate consequences of this red-herring discussion is that there are plenty of questions about Obama’s background and history that we would like to have answered. In spite of two books of memoirs, there remain murky areas in his biography. And when it comes to those college transcripts, count us among those who’d love to know whether Dr. Bailout ever took an advanced economics class and how he performed in it.
Barack Obama may prefer European-style socialized health care. He may consider himself a citizen of the Earth and sometimes address his audiences as “people of the world,” as though he were born not in another country but on another planet. Like Bruce Springsteen, he has a lot of bad political ideas; but he was born in the U.S.A.
A natural born citizen would have 2 parents of the same nationality as per William Blackstone, Commentaries of 1765.
National Review was sinking but they have hit rock bottom. It seems like it all fell apart after Bill died. Sad.
We keep hearing the “let’s move on” or “let’s forcus on...” - it takes 5 minutes to provide the long form BC.
It does not distract from anything.
National Review was sinking but they have hit rock bottom. It seems like it all fell apart after Bill died. Sad.
We keep hearing the “let’s move on” or “let’s forcus on...” - it takes 5 minutes to provide the long form BC.
It does not distract from anything.
The name which President please.
Thursday - visited her apt. briefly after the flight arrived that night
Friday - 8:45 to 10’ish AM at apt.
left for a walk in the neighborhood
SS picked him up and back to apt.
left for a lunch back at his hotel
2:34 to 4:05 PM at apt. until leaving for airport
http://www.starbulletin.com/news/20081025_Obamas_emotional_visit_home_ends_quietly.html
If you send a Letter to the Editor of NR, you get an Out of Office reply from them. Hmmmm?
And that’s not even your grandmother who raised you, or after you said you had missed the chance to be with your mother in her last days.
BINGO! You win the Cupie doll!
The GOP doesn't have ANY idea as to how to stop Obama and they understand that if we push him out on this issue, Biden/Clinton take over and the GOP is a permanent minority party. Like the Tory Party in the UK. So, the GOP, in its infinite brilliance, ehem, really need Obama around until 2012 in the pathetic hope that Mitt or some other doofus GOP candidate (excluding the capable Palin) will actually be able to stumble into the White House in a Jimmy Carter redeux.
The brilliant strategy of the perennial loser! We win by default because we have NO idea how to govern the USA!
The GOP is a clown club...
You and the msm are confusing "native born" with "natural born." Those are two different terms.
Please remeber that Bill's idiot son VOTED FOR OBAMA! Of course he's going to cover for him now...
Please remember that Bill's idiot son VOTED FOR OBAMA! Of course he's going to cover for him now...
It has EVERYTHING to do with his parents. A natural born citizen has 2 parents of the same nationality as per William Blackstone, Commentaries of 1765. It doesn't matter what current law says unless you intend to dump the Constitution.
And the child of 2 illegals is a citizen but NOT a natural born citizen.
Check out the case of Chester Arthur.
I still marvel at the amazing coincidence that granny died the night before the election. What is the chance of THAT happening?????
The damage Obeyme will do by 2012 is enormous. He needs to be attacked on several fronts at the same time.
Complete supposition and not out of the realm of possibilities.
The fact of the matter is he owes it to the American people to come clean, after all. he did promise transparency, didn't he?
The SCOTUS hasn’t ruled on the definition of “is”, but I think most of us have an understanding of it’s meaning.
So what you are saying is that the Grandparents lied about where their grandchild was born back in 1961 when they notified the papers. Why would they do that?
OMG, Thank you so much for clarifying this. I did not have the patience to do it!
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