lolgaxe wrote:
gbaji wrote:
Given the sheer volume of complete BS reported over the last year or so by "unnamed sources", and given that this is yet another "just what liberals want to believe" claim, yeah, I'm going to go with "made it up completely". Why should I believe differently?
Mostly that this is a more solid investigation with genuine leads than the whole birth certificate thing and you chased that particular dragon for the better part of a decade, Quixote.
I treated "unnamed sources" exactly the same in that issue too (gave them no weight). My assessment of both issues is based on a series of facts. In the case of the birth certificate question, it went like this:
1. The constitution requires that someone be a natural born citizen in order to hold the office of president.
2. INS rules require that to be a
natural born US citizen one must either be born on US soil, have two parents who are US citizens, or if one parent is not, the other must have lived in the US for at least 5 years past the age of 15 (er, or something similar to that, since I can't recall the exact age and/or number of years).
3. Obama's father was not a US citizen, and his mother did not meet the age/residence requirement, so he could only be a natural born citizen if he was born in the US.
4. At the time of Obama's birth, the state of Hawaii allowed for birth certificates by application rather than witnessed birth.
5. A certificate by application may or may not meet the natural born citizenship requirement (never tested in court)
6. The fact of whether his birth certificate was generated by application would only be apparent by examination of the full long form certificate, and would not appear in the short "certification of birth".
7. Obama only provided the certification of birth
8. Ergo, to determine if he qualifies as a natural born citizen he should provide the full long form for examination.
That's it. Note, there's no reliance on unnamed sources. Everything in here is a known fact. To me, this was never about whether he actually was a natural born citizen, but that he had not provided adequate documentation to prove it. It's not about what I believe, anymore than it's about whether that cop pulling you over believes you have a valid license or not. He's not going to accept a library card in lieu of a drivers license, right? Same deal here.
On the issue of Trump and the whole Russian collusion thing, there are so many gaps and questions and pure speculation involved, that it's impossible to even set up a logical sequence to explain it. The closest you can come up with is:
1. Trump won the election.
2. Some people speculate that the Russians may have wanted him to.
3. Some people speculate that maybe the Russians took illegal actions to help him win.
4. Some people speculate that maybe Trump or someone in his campaign knew this and worked with the Russians to do <something> to help him win.
5. If that speculation is true, then maybe there's evidence of this somewhere.
6. In the absence of evidence, let's just create an investigation to see if we can find some.
7. And after a year, and still no evidence, let's just keep looking!
8. Honestly, no clue. This whole thing makes no sense.
In the first case, I can show a clear legal requirement which drives the entire issue. Where is the legal issue in the second case? Is there one? What law is being violated? In the first case, it's clear: Article II, section 1 of the US constitution is the law in question. What law is involved in the Trump/Russian collusion thing? Does someone think Trump violated election laws? Which one? I mean, to prove anything here, you'd need to show that someone actually broke a freaking law, right? When you have an investigation and no one even seems to know what law they think
might have been violated, you really ought to maybe question what the heck is going on.
I'll ask again, for like the 10th time: What law does anyone here think that Trump, or someone on his campaign actually violated, and which they think in some way had to do with him getting elected? That's the crux of this issue. It's abundantly obvious that this isn't about finding proof of collusion with the Russians to rig the election. It's about having an investigation, so you can keep putting people under oath, and keep looking into their pasts and actions, and eventually, when you do that long enough, to enough people, you'll find "something". And that's really not about the election at all, but about affecting public perception.
It's the freaking Plame investigation all over again. Same deal. We know there's no crime to investigate, but we'll have an investigation anyway. And we'll leak juicy tidbits along the way to keep the public speculating, and keep impacting the administration, and then, at the very end, we'll find a few folks to slap a perjury charge or obstruction of justice charge on, just so we can say we did something. I'll go on record right now and state that at the end of this, there will be no legal charges filed that equate in any way with "collusion with the Russians to rig the election". Just as there was no charge in the Plame investigation related to "disclosing the secret status of a CIA operative".
That's a pretty safe claim, right? I mean, is there anyone here who honestly thinks otherwise? So yeah, the thin you're claiming is a "solid investigation with genuine leads" isn't. And frankly, you know this. You're just willing to play along because you care more about the political impact than you do about our legal system having any sort of sanity to it.