When The MSM Gets It . Fringe claim Obama not a US citizen

Fringe claim Obama not a US citizen
[link to news.theage.com.au]
July 30, 2009 - 2:54PM

A small group of fringe conservatives, many fundamentally opposed to the notion of an African-American as president, are challenging President Barack Obama's eligibility for the US presidency.

On blogs and even before US courts, the so-called "Birthers" are using the Constitution, with its stipulation that presidents be US natural born citizens, to argue Obama should not be in the White House.

Despite proof that Obama was born in the US state of Hawaii, including a birth certificate affirming that fact, rumours continue to spread, fuelled by a group that critics say includes right-wing militants, racists and Holocaust deniers.

"These are people who are fundamentally either racist or extreme right-wingers. That's where the whole movement is coming from," said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, which studies extremist groups.

The movement is composed of "people who very much do not want Barack Obama to be president, largely because he is black, certainly because he is liberal," he added.

On sites like WorldNetDaily.com, where a petition questioning Obama's place of birth has attracted more than 400,000 electronic "signatories," the so-called Birthers are daily raising "new doubts about the story of Obama's birth."

One of them has already tried in vain three times to sell on EBay a birth certificate purporting to show that Obama was born in Kenya.

They are also taking their cause before US courts, where several lawsuits claiming that Obama was not born on US soil have been dismissed, including by the Supreme Court, which refused to hear argument on the issue.

At the beginning of the week, authorities in the state of Hawaii were forced for the second time since the senator from Illinois became president to certify that Barack Hussein Obama was in fact born in the Kapiolani maternity ward in Honolulu on August 4, 1961 at 7.24pm local time.

The US House of Representatives on Monday passed a non-legally-binding text on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Hawaii's entry in the United States, affirming that "the 44th president of the United States was born in Hawaii."

"In America there is a history of conspiracy thinking that... is part of a tradition of dissent," said Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates, which studies right-wing movements.

Berlet said a small percentage of the population believes the government has been taken over by a "secret elite" that includes "freemasons, the Catholics, Jewish bankers" and others.

He noted that former president Bill Clinton was also the subject of conspiracy theories that claimed he was seeking the help of the United Nations to confiscate all weapons on American soil.

While the movement has an audience of several hundreds of thousands of sympathisers, their theories are also being broadcast by media figures such as CNN's Lou Dobbs and radio host Rush Limbaugh.

"So you have this right-wing social movement, relatively small but angry, and then you have these major public figures, inflaming them with rhetoric and conspiracy allegations on national television," Berlet told AFP.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, there were 926 racist groups in the United States in 2008, compared to 602 in 2000 - a rise of 54 per cent.

"I think that's very significant, and the numbers continue to rise," said Potok. "Very likely the white supremacist world has been energised by the election of a black man into the White House."

Why Do Doubts About Obama's Birthplace Persist?
[link to www.npr.org]
Barack Obama was still a long-shot presidential candidate when he posted copies of his Hawaii-issued birth certificate online to satisfy fringe conspiracists who claimed he wasn't born in the United States.

Public service "fact check" Web sites responding to persistent right-wing agitators confirmed nearly a year ago that the certificate is authentic; they turned up a 1961 item in The Honolulu Advertiser announcing the Aug. 4 birth of a son to "Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of Kalanianaole Hwy."

And though it could hamstring show host Lou Dobbs, CNN's very own Obama-birthplace skeptic, the network's President Jon Klein — after a "reinvestigation of the fable" — proclaimed the so-called birthers story dead.

Evidence, Schmevidence

Evidence, in fact, has been proved to feed conspiracies, rather than kill them. Just ask former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: They found that three official investigations confirming that top aide Vince Foster committed suicide failed to tamp down theories that Foster was murdered — and that the first couple just maybe had a hand in it.

"For people who tend to gravitate to these views, there is simply no evidence that will satisfy them, because they believe that all of the institutions that supply a report are part of the conspiracy," says Michael Barkun, author of A Culture of Conspiracy.

Indeed, in a nod to the birthers — and with an eye on the 2012 national race, when Obama will most likely run for re-election — Republican Rep. Bill Posey of Florida and nine GOP co-sponsors have submitted a bill that would require presidential candidates to provide a birth certificate.
[link to media.npr.org]
This photo provided by The Honolulu Advertiser shows President Obama's birth announcement, left column, center, in the Sunday, Aug. 13, 1961, edition of the paper. The Honolulu Advertiser/AP

Keeping the story alive, and trying to invalidate the first African-American president (one with a Kenyan-born father) — well, that's the point, says Jerrold Post, director of the political psychology program at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs.

"This whole us-versus-them psychology is central to politics, and hate-mongering leaders will exploit this to the fare-thee-well," Post says.
Persistence And Technology

History provides a suitcase full of cases that show evidence can't kill a conspiracy theory, especially one rooted in politics and identity, no matter how outlandish.

From the founding of the country, there were conspiracy theorists who believed that world events were being controlled by the secret "Illuminati" society, a stubborn theory reinvigorated in recent years by author Dan Brown's books, including The Da Vinci Code.

Similar puppet-master conspiracy theories have arisen around The Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, international consortiums of business and political leaders.

There are fringe groups that still assert the moon landing was a hoax, that no plane crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, and that President George W. Bush had advance notice of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington.

But the birthers have been born into a new society, technologically speaking.
"Their conspiracy theory is garden variety in the sense that it's a simple idea that can be readily disproven," says Barkun, a Syracuse University professor. "The difference, I think, lies in the fact that it has emerged at a time when the communications environment permits it to be disseminated extremely rapidly to large numbers of people by the Internet, YouTube, and cable television," he says.

Aside from Dobbs' show, the birthers movement has also found an audience on YouTube, thanks to a video of a screaming woman confronting Delaware Rep. Mike Castle, who is considering a run for the Senate, at a home state forum for constituents.

More than 710,000 YouTube visitors have watched the unidentified woman hold aloft a plastic bag that she says contains her birth certificate, while she demands to know why "you people are ignoring his birth certificate."

"He is not an American citizen," she screams. "He is a citizen of Kenya. I want my country back."

Castle responds: "If you're referring to the president there, he is a citizen of the United States." Castle is booed.

What most people would view as truly bizarre, conspiracy theorists find energizing.

Crazy Or Not?

It would be easy to dismiss the screaming woman and other birther adherents as mentally unhinged. Some on the left have taken pains to note that James Von Brunn, the suspect in the June murder of a Holocaust Museum guard, ascribed to the birther conspiracy.

But "there is absolutely no empirical evidence that people who believe in conspiracy theories are mentally ill," Barkun says, "though, obviously, some people who believe in conspiracy theories are mentally ill."

"If one were to say, hypothetically, that they had some medical problem, that would get us off the hook very easily," Barkun says.

However, political psychologist Post does not discount the role that paranoia plays in the world of conspiracy theories.

"The quality of paranoia is not strained," he says, paraphrasing Shakespeare's Portia. "It rains from the gentle heavens."

"Paranoia is the most political of mental illnesses," Post says. "You need to have enemies."

There is no single explanation as to why psychologically normal people attach themselves to disproved conspiracies. Some may find comfort in contemplating a cabal: It provides a sense that they know the truth about how the world is organized — and others don't, experts say.

The birthers may also be driven by Obama's mixed race, his international upbringing, and the economic uncertainty that has settled over the nation.

"The story that these folks tell is based on the idea that Obama is an illegitimate president," says Mark Fenster, author of Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in the American Culture.

"Any evidence of legitimacy would spoil the narrative, and that would end the pleasure of spinning out the narrative," says Fenster, an associate dean at the University of Florida's Levin College of Law.

Damage To GOP?

End the narrative, and the spotlight would recede — a development that no doubt would be welcomed by mainstream Republicans, now being unwittingly drawn into the daffy narrative.

"With midterm elections coming up, and Obama losing some momentum, this would be a perfect opportunity for the Republicans to move to the middle, or [for the GOP to] rebrand itself as the party of competence," Fenster says.

"To the extent they become obsessed with marginal, complicated issues like birth certificates, it will be more difficult for them to run strong — especially in 2012," he says.

But Posey this week said he has no intention of withdrawing his birth certificate bill — "why would he?" his spokesman said. When asked to comment on the purpose of his legislation, Posey responded with the following statement:

"There have been questions raised in the past about candidates meeting the Constitutional requirements for the Office of President. My bill simply requires that future candidates for president file with the Federal Elections Commission the necessary documentation that shows a candidate has met the three requirements for the Office of President. It simply implements the Constitution through legislation where there are no current standards in law."

Republicans are bracing for birther confrontations back home, and liberal Democrats have been making the most of the situation.

A Huffington Post writer with a microphone and camera chased House members around the Capitol Monday, demanding to know whether they believed Obama is a natural-born citizen.

The House voted unanimously Monday night to approve a resolution that not only celebrated the 50th anniversary of Hawaii's statehood but also included this no-nonsense clause: "Whereas the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961." Posey voted in favor of the resolution.

Just Lie Low

Questions about the birthers arose during White House spokesman Robert Gibbs' meeting with the press Monday.

"I almost hate to indulge in such an august setting as the White House," Gibbs said, "the made-up, fictional nonsense" of whether or not the president was born in this country.

It's been proven "ad nauseam," he said, that the president is a natural-born citizen. Gibbs noted that for $15, anyone can set up an Internet address and "say whatever you want."

The White House has been pretty savvy, Fenster says, by standing back and suggesting that they're the "sane adults in the room, while the Republicans are out there looking for birth certificates."

[link to www.starbulletin.com]
'Natural-born' isn't so simple to define
The stipulation is a relic to be retired.

Let's say Barack Obama had been born in Kenya. Why wouldn't we still want him to be our president?

The recent surge in fringe chatter about Obama's eligibility for the presidency has no basis in fact. Obama was born in the state of Hawaii and thus meets the constitutional requirement that the president be a "natural born citizen."

Apparently seeking to harness some political advantage by playing to the so-called birther constituency, a group of Republican congressmen has sponsored legislation that would require presidential candidates to provide a birth certificate to the Federal Election Commission to establish eligibility.

The bill doesn't purport to define natural born, however. That's no easy task, and it should not be left to the bureaucracy.

The outrage among birthers has been fueled partly by a quirk in the history of citizenship law. If Obama had been born in Kenya, he would not have been a citizen at birth by virtue of his American mother. His mother, then 18, would have fallen short of the requirement that a citizen parent has been a U.S. resident for five years after her 14th birthday. (The requirement was shortened to two years for children born after 1986.) Obama's mother would have been able to bring him into the United States as an immigrant, five years after which he would have been eligible for citizenship.

What about John McCain's case? Even though McCain was born to American parents in the U.S.-controlled Panama Canal Zone, he may not have been a natural-born citizen because of an even more obscure legal technicality. (A legislative fix just before McCain's first birthday declared children born to American parents in the Canal Zone to be citizens at birth.)

There are other gray areas. Foreign-born adopted children are extended citizenship automatically upon admission into the United States with their new parents. Can any of the thousands who have moved here as infants from China, Korea, Guatemala, or Romania grow up to be president? Even if the circumstances of their birth can't be shoehorned into the constitutional language, there's a strong argument that they should be eligible.

And then there are the more than 15 million naturalized Americans who more clearly fall short of being natural-born citizens - among whom Obama might have been counted if the details of his mother's life were a little different. For them, the presidential eligibility clause represents sanctified discrimination, a kind of asterisk next to the principle that they enjoy equality with other citizens.

The Obama citizenship (non)controversy should be used not to better define arcane constitutional language, much less to impose filing requirements for the presidency. Rather, it's an opportunity to get rid of the birth requirement altogether.

The natural-born provision is an artifact of a time when one's birthplace was fraught with consequences. In the feudal conception of natural law, one was born into the protection of a territory's sovereign, for which one was thought to owe an indissoluble duty of allegiance. The framers of the Constitution worked in an era when such bonds were taken seriously. It made sense, then, to protect against a sleeper at the top.

Today, birthplace is hardly so meaningful. Many more individuals are being born outside the United States to U.S. citizen parents (often with dual citizenship), and others are naturalizing at an early age and maturing as Americans in every sense. Notions of perpetual allegiance dissipated long ago.

At the same time, the natural-born condition bars those who might well be among the best-qualified for the office. Obama would be no less fit for the presidency if he had been born in his father's homeland, and yet that accident of birth would have deprived the electorate of the opportunity to choose him.

Recent efforts to repeal the natural-born prerequisite by constitutional amendment were spearheaded by Republicans looking to clear a path to the presidency for Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger. Utah Republican Orrin Hatch introduced the "Equal Opportunity to Govern Amendment" in 2003, and it enjoyed bipartisan support, including that of Michigan's Canadian-born Democratic governor, Jennifer Granholm.

But constitutional amendments require extraordinary political energy: a two-thirds vote of both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the state legislatures. No one has been willing to spend that sort of political capital on an issue that never seems urgent until it gets partisan.

Of course, it would take even more political fortitude to take up the amendment in the face of the birther crusade. Calling for repeal of the natural-born requirement now might be taken as a concession that there's something to the claim that Obama was not born in the United States.

But why not call the birthers' bluff? Their underlying nativist premise is that anyone not born a citizen should be forever disqualified from the presidency. It's time to make all American citizens eligible to run for and serve as president."
[link to www.starbulletin.com]
No doubt about Obama's birth
Birther noise seems to have reached its peak this week as Congress passed a resolution commemorating the 50th anniversary of Hawaii statehood, noting that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. Conspiracy idiots continue to maintain that Obama was not born in the United States so should not be president. They will cling to such nonsense despite conclusive evidence to the contrary.
The birthers are loud but not numerous, comprising the distant fringe of the Republican Party. The noise they make is useful in recognizing the extreme right equivalent of the left-wing crazies who contend that the 9/11 attacks were "an inside job." We would begin to worry if either extreme became silent or worked in the shadows.

Presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs does not expect the birthers will go away. "If I had some DNA," he said at a press briefing on Monday, "it wouldn't assuage those that don't believe he was born here. But I have news for them and for all of us: The president was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, the 50th state of the greatest country on the face of the Earth. He's a citizen."

That was well-established to skeptics during last year's presidential campaign. Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the state health director, issued a statement in October that she had seen the "original vital records" that Obama was born in Honolulu on Aug. 4, 1961. She issued a similar statement on Monday. Hawaii's archaic secrecy laws prohibit her from showing it in public, but Obama has posted an electronic facsimile on the Internet.

If any doubt is left, both the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and The Honolulu Advertiser included Obama's birth in vital-statistics columns in August 1961, available on microfilm in the main state library. Were the state Department of Health and Obama's parents really in cahoots to give false information to the newspapers, perhaps intending to clear the way for the baby to someday be elected president of the United States?

True to his audience, Rush Limbaugh has told radio listeners that Obama "has yet to prove that he's a citizen." CNN's Lou Dobbs said on his radio show last week that a caller's claim that Obama is a Kenyan "can't be discounted." A Dobbs substitute later said CNN had "found no basis for the questions about the president's birthplace." We appreciate Dobbs' candor: His reputation as an anti-immigration fanatic is now firmly in place.

The Hawaii statehood resolution passed in both the House and the Senate without opposition. However, Rep. John Campbell, R-Calif., has not withdrawn a bill that he is sponsoring that would require future presidential candidates to present their birth certificates. Estimates of the number of birther members of Congress range from nine (Politico) to 17 (Salon)."

:fit:

Last Edited by entropy on 07/30/2009 04:13 AM