So, birthers. Huh.
Yes, there are still people out there wondering if Barack Obama is eligible to be president. At last count, 17 lawsuits have been filed either claiming Obama is not a natural-born citizen or demanding that he prove that he is (including a reservist who refused to be deployed because the Commander in Chief is supposedly illegitimate).
So why, you ask, doesn’t he simply provide some evidence that he was born in the U.S.—a birth certificate, perhaps—to quiet the doubters and put the matter to rest. Well, there are several problems with this. First, how many of his predecessors or opponents have been asked to show their birth certificates, let alone done so? Maybe McCain, born in the Panama Canal Zone while it was part of the U.S. Second, he did, as early as 2007. (Incidentally, I love the name of the St. Petersberg Times‘s primary-sources Web site.)
The trouble is, there’s always something else, somewhere to move the goalposts to. Now the clamor is for the “long-form” birth certificate. Then that’ll be questioned, because it’ll be a digital copy, because it’s hard to put a piece of paper on the Internet. Even then, there’ll be people saying “yeah, but that’s not his super-duper-secret birth certificate” and the eligibility Calvinball game will continue. A few holdouts will refuse to accept any docuent as genuine, and therefore probitive, if it doesn’t give his place of birth as Kenya, meaning there is literally no document that will prove to these people that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.
Then there’s the third issue: Obama’s a bit busy right now.
(h/t Bint Alshamsa at Feministe and the boys and girls at ONTD_P)
3 comments
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July 21, 2009 at 9:48 pm
stevemacgregor
They have to come up with some reason not to like the President other than the fact that he is half black.
The spite in me wants to steal the Republican line; ‘You guys lost – get over it!’
But that would be mean.
stevemacgregor
July 23, 2009 at 9:29 pm
Charles Lieberman
I honestly don’t think race is more than lagniappe — there are people who refuse to believe any electorate anywhere (not just here, also Nicaragua, say, or Venezuela, or Iran decades ago) could actually, legitimately, knowingly elect a liberal.
And of course the same people think Obama is a liberal.
July 27, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Charles Lieberman
Ok, actually, no. I did think that, and I read a bit more about it (Womanist Musings, for one), and I think “lagniappe” is wrong. I still think people don’t believe he’s president because he’s liberal, but they don’t believe he’s a citizen because he’s black (=other), which bolsters the case that he’s not really president.