Smasharoo wrote:
this is pure unadulterated birther conspiracy he either won't admit to or just go silent on.
No, just seems like an arcane law that would have actually applied had Obama been born in Kenya. Nothing particularly conspiracish about it.
Yet, even after the law in question is detailed we *still* have folks saying silly things like "isn't 18 old enough?". Not according to the law, it's not.
Quote:
What he won't admit to is finding the insane nutbag idea that Obama was born in Kenya (and that it was covered up meticulously in all ways SINCE HIS BIRTH because someone was aware that this arcane law would preclude him from becoming the first black president 45 years later) anything but laughable, That's flat earth crazy.
Except no cover up was necessary. Being born in Kenya would not prevent him from being a citizen. It would only mean he wasn't a natural born citizen, which, as I've explained numerous times
only matters if someone's trying to become president of the US. All the places he lived, jobs he had, including in the state legislature in Illinois, and then the US senate, did not require that he be a natural born citizen. Thus, there would have never been any reason to check if he'd actually been born in Kenya and his mom later filled out he paperwork to get a birth certificate for him in Hawaii, or if he was born in Hawaii.
In precisely the same way no one checked the birth certificate of our previous governor in California to see if he was born outside the US. Because... wait for it... it doesn't matter. Unless one is running for President of the US. Which Obama was.
My problem with this issue was never based on a belief that Obama was in fact born outside the US, but the fact that we apparently have absolutely no process by which a determination of that criteria to be president can be made. In Obama's case we can all look at people who believe that he was born in Kenya and laugh at them, but those are questions of merit (is there sufficient evidence that he was not born in the US?). But because of all those judges who dismissed the cases on standing instead of merit we now have judicial precedent which says that no US citizen can challenge that requirement of a president when his name in on the ballot. And no US citizen can challenge that requirement if that person wins the election. And no US citizen can challenge that requirement once the electoral college has voted. And no US citizen can challenge that requirement even after that person takes office.
Which effectively means that because of a bunch of judges more concerned with protecting a candidate's sealed records from what could fairly be labeled a fishing expedition, we have no method to address this within our laws. Yet, it's actually written into the US constitution. IMO, the desire to make this into a political rather than legal issue did great harm to our system of laws. Sure, it's fun to yukk it up at the birthers, but sometimes even silly claims need to be taken seriously enough to at least use the law properly to oppose them. All it would have taken was one judge to simply order the documents opened, take a look at them, and then rule that the documents proved natural born citizenship, and the whole issue would have been done. That's how it should have been handled. By skirting the law in order to avoid even having to deal with the case, those judges set a horrible precedent.
When McCain's natural born citizenship status was questioned, he used an open procedure to get a finding from the US congress stating that he met the criteria. He did this deliberately and ahead of time to ensure that no such questions would come up. Obama chose to do the exact opposite. That alone speaks volumes IMO.
