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.
That is what Obama has!
Right now I am looking at my son’s Certificate of Live Birth issued by the state of SC. It is half of the size of what Obama has, but had 10 times the information. Including Doctors name and signature, Registrars name and signature at the time of birth, mine and my husbands state of birth and the date it was filed by the registrar.
I have also just recently looked at Certificate of Live birth of a friend of mine while we were getting papers together for her passport. She is 50+ yrs. old. Hers was actually handwritten, but it had the same information as my sons, mine does too and I am 46 and was born in NY. Just last year I needed a replacement and it was just like my kids. Plus I signed the BC’s of all three of my kids.
You have two documents. THey both certify, they both provide certification. You are right that certification is a process and a certificate is a document. But what your bureaucrats call the process of certification is carried out how?
By providing a second, different document. Both documents are certificates. Both documents certify. Both documents provide certification.
The bureaucrats have decreed that the one document, which they call a certificate, certifies x and y and z. They also decree that document 2 (certificate 2) should not be called “a certificate” but a “certification.”
They are illiterate. And their stupid illiteracy produces confusion. If they just used clearly distinct words to label document/certificate 1 and document/certificate 2, things would be clearer.
Linguistically speaking, there is no difference between a certificate which certifies and produces certification and a certification which takes place by means of a certificate.
The bureaucrats won’t call the second certificate a certificate but will call it a document.
If you can’t see that the distinction they make between certificate and certification is entirely artificial and created by them, I’m sorry.
They could avoid all this by using clearly distinct words for the levels of certification provided by the two distinct documents/certificates.
But they don’t. And you’ve drunk their lilnguistic koolaid.
The only comparison I’m making is the money spent. If spending a lot of money to defend yourself makes you guilty then Palin would be guilty. We don’t think she is (at least not on all of it). I don’t think the money spent is relevant.
Ah, so it’s a made up number based on assumptions. I suspect Obama is loving the birthers. They actually succeed in making the Dems look reasonable by comparison.
Assuming it take five years to become a U.S. citizen, and assuming he moved to the U.S. in 1824, William Arthur probably wasn’t a naturalized U.S. citizen by the time Chester was born in 1829.
ex animo
davidfarrar
But it does make a difference if one example (Palin) HAS to defend herself against an ethics complaint, while the other example (Obama) could make the suit go away by complying with the request.
You can live in Ohio but have your wedding in Hawaii. You’d still put your wedding announcement in the local paper in Ohio.
There is no quid pro quo in the statement.
Discrediting Republicans doesn’t make Dems look “reasonable” when a 2004 quote from Barack Obama on Air America is surfacing. One in which he decryies the size of the document, the rush to implement it, and the lack of debate that the party in power is willing to give it. He’s been exposed a naked hypocrite. Everything they campaigned on “new tone”, “transparency”, and “an end to the culture of corruption” has been shown to be a LIE.
John McCain
What's being certified here are the facts of a particular birth. The parents and doctor actually do most of the certification. The facts which they certified were recorded on a typed birth certificate.
A certificate shows what has been certified by those qualified to certify the facts. The old birth certificate showed what had been certified 48 years ago for Obama.
No one today who wasn't there can certify what happened 48 years ago. They can do one of two things:
1. Certify that they are providing a true copy of an original birth certificate from 48 years ago. No process involved, just copying a source document.
2. Certify that they have examined available records and reproduced the 48 year old information on a new print out. The are certifying, 48 years later, that they have examined available records and transposed it via computer to a new printout, certifying that the information gathered is correct. They went through some certification process 48 years later to verify the information presented on a new document.
There's a difference. Sorry you can't see it. The two should have different designations.
Nothing that I've read on this subject in the last 8 months (which is quite a lot) supports your contention. In fact, there are volumes of well-sourced documentary evidence on this website that utterly refutes what you just stated.
And such is not the case between Barack Obama's Certification of Live Birth, and his actual long form Certificate of Live Birth, which is supposedly on file for him in the state of Hawaii.
Of course the two should have different designations. My point was that “certificate” and “certification” cannot intelligently be the two designating terms. Bureaucrat fiat may try to make these two words work as “different designations,” but they only will “mean differently” if someone like you writes a dozen paragraphs explain why identical terms actually mean different things.
Wouldn’t it be easier to use terms that really are different? Neither you nor the bureaucrats would have to write these long explanations.
But that would be simple. And bureaucrat and simple don’t mix. They are both different terms AND very different realities.
There you have it. Someone here calculated how many thousands of hours and how many hundred of people transposing info from the original long form to the digital short form. The number was astronomical. This was as recent as within a week, but I don't remember who it was. Of course, as everyone knows, mistakes are always made when transcribing. There must be a back up of the original to clear up any future questions. There is no way the original was ever destroyed. Stored in another place and not easily gotten to, but not destroyed.
So how would the announcement be any kind of proof that he was born in Hawaii?
I remember when I went to college and lived in two cities. One was home and one was where I went to school during the semester.
Momma was a globetrotter. Momma was a rolling stone, wherever she laid her hat was her home. It’s one reason that Barry eventually moved in with Grandma in Hawaii.
No, we conservatives think Juan McWhacked is a RINO = Pub in name one = Democrat.
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