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.
The Democrats have already started exploiting this, IMO. They are trying to tar the GOP with the birther brush (hence the recent increase in media coverage of this issue) to try to make them look like kooks.
If you don’t like this topic then why post about it?
Also, it is interesting that you’d rather take sides and believe the Obama apologists rather than examine the abundance of material presented against him.
The BC is becoming less and less important and is not a silver bullet as his Natural Born Citizen status is in EXTREME doubt and there is abundant evidence that he committed fraud of various types throughout his life.
But if this work is too distatsteful for you, then let others do it without your hindrance.
Minor problem there though.
Apparently, neither Dunham nor Obama ever resided in the place of residence that’s presented on that birth announcement in the papers.
A leftist professor named Orland Scott Lefforge and his wife did. He died in 2007 and she died 10 days before this newspaper announcement was “discovered.”
If true…doesn’t this make even the most ardent anti-birther question that perhaps something is going on here?
I’m not saying to draw a conclusion as to what that something is…just acknowledge that people are trying to hide something.
Oh please. Some of us are capable of multi tasking. Even the press can cover Gatesgate and Healthcaregate at the same time and still have time to mention “The Birthers”. The AP is even throwing in a Doddgate. *shocked* Should we not have pursed Rathergate? The Blue Dress? Kerry's war record (or lack thereof)
Note to National Review. Why eight paragraphs to make your point? KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)
You mean the guy upstream who thinks "natural born" comes from the sperm of the father? If Barack's mom is a U.S. citizen, and if he was born in Hawaii, then he is "natural born."
It doesn’t matter.
DB
Not quite on your analysis. It’s not that his mother had not been in the U.S. long enough. It’s that under the laws in 1961 if both parents were not American citizens and the one that was an American citizen was under 18, the child would have to be born in the U.S. if the child was to be considered a natural born U.S. citizen. Obama’s mother (Anne Dunham) was 16 or 17 I believe so Obama would have to be born in the U.S. in order to be a natural born American citizen.
The NR's editorial might be more convincing if they'd gotten the name of the document Obama released correct. He released a "Certification of Live Birth", not a "Certificate of Live Birth".
So, two state officials have examined the vault copy? Why do we have to rely on two state officials? Why not release the vault copy?
I cared little or nothing about this issue for months, until I started noting these little discrepancies, discrepancies that could be so easily cleared up.
For once I agree with the RINOs at NR. This is pure foolishness.
Look denial is not reality. This essay denies that Obama lived a good part of his life abroad. No previous US President has done so. Obama has been a citizen by law of at least three nations — Kenya by birth due to the man named as his dad, America by birth due to his mom’s cituizenship, and Indonesia by his adoption by Lolo Soetoro. Thus it is not unreasonable to suspect that Obama traveled to Pakistan under Indonesian passport when he was twenty. Nor is it unreasonable to suspect that he attended college as a foreign exchange student, he may even have attended Occidental as US citizen, and then attended Columbia as a foreign exchange student.
Yet the essay is blindered against such reasonable speculations.
Willful blindness leads to disasters, usually.
What part of
“There is no secondary document cloaked in darkness, only the state records that are used to generate birth certificates when they are requested.”
did you find confusing?
Well,mamma and papa were rolling stones! I’m approaching
senior status and my health care is a primary concern.
Maybe the US Congress has the power to unseal the record?
If an authentic long form birth certificate were shown, analyzed, I think the birthers would be satisfied. All this hiding and obfuscation just make the question linger.
Your “... and if he was born in Hawaii ...”
Is the key - which is yet unproven.
It might be that he's hoping it is, but I'm confident us ever growing number of misguided souls can walk and chew gum at the same time can also see through the other bs he's shoveling. I say every time someone starts spouting off about a "real" Hawaiian bc that we refer them to Sun Yat Sen's "real" Hawaiian bc. http://sunyatsenhawaii.org/images/doh/dh-1.jpg
Hey!
We have all been screaming for the msm (controlled media) to get onboard on the BC story—so here it is!
They all want a piece of the pie now—didja think they were going to take the Patriot side of the issue?
Fat chance—they are just going to cloud the issue even further now. The state gubmint in Hawaii is going to glorify him now.
At least Rush and Glenn Beck are spelling the truth out to the American people now (not We The People—the wee sheeple), on other issues that is.
On the other hand, GB has not attacked the real issues lately—that I have heard anyway—y’know, the BC issue, of course, and those “camps”, ML, etc. Who knowa? perhaps he too will wake up...???
Not suggesting anything.
Just reporting to you what is now known...and verifiable.
Obama and family never lived at the published addressed in the announcement—what that means, who the heck knows?
All I know if you were buying a car from a man and you saw this sort of squirrely pattern all over his life, you’d probably go to his competitor down the street.
Yet he’s our POTUS.
The one time I visited Virginia City Nevada I found myself looking at posters which advertised "See the Cartwright's Ponderosa Ranch" Money was chargde for this even though 1) Neither the Cartwrights nor the Ponderosa existed. and 2) Bonanza was filmed on the Universal backlots and sound stage in Hollywood so there wasn't even a hint of reality to the ad. P.T. Barnum had something to say about this and I guess Africa has dropped the lead time from a minute to 15 seconds.
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