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.
I do not believe she died the night before the election.
What is the more likely scenario is she died when he went to Hawaii 10-14 days before the election, but the Commies running his campaign decided to withhold that announcement until the night before the election to obtain maximum effect, ie., sympathy.
I posted this back at the time, and my opinion hasnt changed.
I had to google that - the offical reason - the obama campaign did not know if that number could be publically disclosed. If you want to see the same cert with the numer not blacked out - head on out to factcheck.org.
Presidential records includes:
(6) personnel and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.
You can look it up.
Then use “source document” and non-source document. You make my point. There is no linguistic difference between certificate and certification. That you have to use circumlocutions to make your point proves my point.
The 1 million is easy to explain
President’s keep retainer lawyers to take care of every kook and nutjob that comes out with some bogus law suit. Governors do this to (see Palin, Sara)
President’s and Governors have real jobs to do and don’t have the time to spend filing briefs and doing other mundane legal tasks which weigh them down.
Hence why the keep lawyers on retainer, and when these lawsuits come up, pay them to take care of it
That is why Governor Palin had 500k in legal debts. That is why President Obama has “spent” 1 million dollars “fighting” the birther charges (even though there is 0 evidence for the 1 million dollar figure except for that asshat at WND)
Not real complicated
Yeah, since 2008. And that refutes what? Not a point I made.
We are conservatives, wintertime. A fact based community. I deal in facts. All you care about is when I started posting.
Stop being part of the problem.
What is with you people???!! What will satisfy you?
1. House pass a resolution on it
2. Why don’t you take the word of other conservatives
3. New York Times “word”, Other reputable “journalists”
4. Politico’s word
5. Some political hack’s word
6. UN Secretary General
Ohh you want actual legal proof, like good enough for a court of law, like what John McCain provided. Nevermind(we don’t have that).
Yet it's front page news and you're here talking about it.
I was replying to multiple people - I wasn’t trying to take you out of context.
Are you referring to Kogelo? If so: There are indeed people flocking to visit that place. This has been referenced by some guests on talk radio and some sites that concentrate on obama’s illegitimacy. The original article this has been drawn from is http://www.nation.co.ke/News/-/1056/519448/-/u1d5wa/-/index.html. Read it for yourself, and when taken as a whole, it doesn’t say what has been purported.
As to the rest of what you said - I find everything about Obama strange - including the fact that he actually got elected. What I am cautioning, however, is not to fall into an obvious trap.
All of them should be. No big deal.
To make you and others look foolish?
Well, you certainly didn't pre-judge, or harbor any bias toward this issue when you "finally set down and did the whole digging thing", did you?
I suggest you keep "digging". It appears that so far, you've done little more than uncover the flimsy excuses in favor of Obama's eligibility.
Fair enough. But my purpose in weighing in is to warn against an undue reliance by conservatives on the birth certificate issue, even when legitimate questions may be said to exist. If Barack Obama and the Democrats are to be be defeated, it will be on the merits of our arguments versus theirs. We cannot beat them if they are making their arguments and we are talking about old Hawaiian documents. In that case, the American people will tune them in, and us out.
That might not be quite fair, given the lengths to which Obama has gone to hide his past, but it is political reality. Moreover, I would argue that the better case we make for a return to Constitutional governance and market-based solutions, the more skeptical the public will become about both Obama's policies and his mysterious history.
And what possible reason is there for Obama to prevent it from being released if it isn’t hiding something?
To make you and others look foolish?
************
Again I ask: what would have been his motivation for not releasing this, and for burying other records (college, medical, etc.), PRIOR to the election?
It seems counterproductive to a political campaign when one is trying to build support and trust, especially when a large part of that campaign is based on “transparency” and “ethical reform”.
Conservatives think John McLaim is not a democrat.. Duuugh..
Early life and education:
“Chester Alan Arthur was the son of Irish born preacher William Arthur and Vermont-born Malvina Stone Arthur.”
ex animo
davidfarrar
I see you got crickets from the Reaganaut for your answer.
If This Thread is a Waste of Time, why did you log onto it?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2098432/posts
Sunday, October 05, 2008 9:01:23 PM · by Kevmo · 54 replies · 766+ views
Free Republic ^ | October 5, 2008 | kevmo
No, i didn’t. Do you have anything that shows any evidence for a lack of eligibility?
Any single incident? Something other than rumor? Because that’s what I looked for - and I couldn’t find anything that existed beyond conjecture.
What cards are you holding?
You know for a fact that he is a U.S. citizen? How do you know that?
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