Birther Bullcrap

You know, little did I, or anyone with a brain, realize just how long lasting and far-reaching the false accusation of the location of Barak Obama’s birth was going to have.

Let us start with a statement.  Barak Obama was born in Hawaii.  Not only does his birth certificate verify that but also there is a birth announcement extant in the Hawaiian newspapers from the time.

Why is that important?  Because at the time of his run for the presidency the common understanding was that if you were not born in the United States you were not allowed to run for President.  According to the United States Constitution, one must be a “natural born citizen”.  According to most, this was to keep out foreign influences.  Maybe so, but I suspect that this was also possibly a slap at Alexander Hamilton.  Hmmm.

In any case, this was used to try to derail the Obama campaign during the initial election cycle.  It was further used by such jerks as Donald Trump as a battle cry to fight against “those evil bad” people who were “illegally” usurping the Oval Office.  In other words, using it as a springboard for their own political agenda and future.

Ironically, while Donald Trump exhorted this theme as he was trying to make a political face for himself, he never used the “natural born” issue against one of his main opponents, Ted Cruz, who was born in Canada and carried dual citizenship until just before he decided to run for President.  Obviously, Trump’s fight against “natural born” was not against where one was born and against who he was talking about but that is an issue for another conversation.

Here is the irony to me, and the reason I did not take it very seriously to be frank.  Barak Obama’s opponent, John McCain did not qualify as a “natural born citizen” based upon the old interpretation that we always were lead to believe was necessary for one to run for President.  He was born in Panama.  Albeit, his father was station in the Panama Canal Zone with the United States Navy, but John McCain was born in a civilian hospital outside of the PCZ.  Now I know that there was a law that was passed giving citizenship to babies born in such circumstances by the United States Congress.  The problem is that the law was passed after John McCain was born.  Also, such a law probably has no bearing on getting around any criteria of the Constitution.  I am also aware that the United States Congress passed a resolution that stated that John McCain was eligible to run for President.  Fine and good.  But once again, Congress does not interpret the Constitution.

I have always suspected that the pseudo-issue of Obama’s birth may have been partially based upon a way to misdirect McCain’s questionable Constitutional qualifications (let me go on record in saying that I agree that he should have been allowed to run for President.  The qualification issue is somewhat bogus, but if one is to interpret according to the letter, he may not have been qualified). 

However, once the movement began it had other, more incipit, motivations.  The question was used to remind people of Obama’s non-traditional family dynamics, his father being an African national (as if that was a surprise), his mother marrying an Indonesian, and so on.  All of these thing to make Obama more and more of an outsider, an outsider to be rejected.  Couple this with the other false claim of his being a Muslim and you can make his the devil incarnate without him saying a word.

In was all BS.  The worst of it was that it gave voice to really, really bad people to sell their garbage to a bunch of ignorant and stupid people who wanted to believe this garbage because they were either afraid or bigoted (same thing) and they wanted to believe there was some justification for their hatred.