Obama and the Birther Movement

I was looking at a news site and there was a link to an article saying that a lawyer has admitted that Obama's birth certificate was faked. My first instinct was to roll my eyes but I think it might be of interest to explain why the Birthers believe what they do and why they are morons. By Birther, I refer to those that think Obama was not born in Hawaii as well as those who are 'just asking questions' because we all know they really mean they think the birth certificate was faked but don't want to look like morons. There are some that believe that Obama was born in Hawaii but his birth certificate has been modified or the original contained embarrassing details he is hiding. Others believe that he was not born in the US (Kenya is the usual theoretical country of birth but I've seen the Soviet Union in a few theories). All of them are Birthers and believe Obama is not eligible to be President.

To be a Birther, one must ignore the fact that Obama's mother was an American citizen and therefore Obama has American citizenship through her. Whether he was born in Hawaii, Kenya or on Mars, he gets citizenship from his mother. Birthers get around this by saying that the law at the time said the American parent of a child born outside the US had to be over the age of 21, but this goes against the Naturalization Act of 1790 which has no age limit for the parent.

Birthers usually state that Obama's father wanted his son to have Kenyan citizenship. Obama's father, who was a Kenyan bureaucrat for decades, never filled out the paperwork to get his son Kenyan citizenship. It should be noted that there's no Kenyan birth certificate for Obama so his father would have had to had the delivery outside a hospital and had no doctor or nurse attending and he would also had to not bother to report his son's birth.

A few days before Obama released a picture of his birth certificate, I came up with what I think is an ironclad proof that Obama and his parents couldn't have gone from Hawaii to Kenya and back in the few days no one saw them before the delivery. Passenger jet travel was still relatively new at the time and very expensive, too expensive for a college student and a teenager to afford on their own. There wouldn't have been direct flights from Hawaii to Kenya and the connecting flights would have involved long wait times, stretching flight time to beyond the few days no one say his parents. Customs for the layovers would have records of his parents' trip. Even an infant needs a passport, so Obama couldn't have gotten back into the US without proper documents. All of this travelling would have involved a nine-months-pregnant woman back when pregnant women were treated as if they were made out of spun glass. Even decades later, people would remember an about-to-give-birth white girl and an African man travelling together. The trip wasn't physically or financially possible in the time frame, Obama's father would have had to go out of his way not to leave a paper trail in Kenya, there would be an international paper trail and certainly problems returning to the US with a newborn.

In addition to my points above, there's the fact that there is hospital paperwork and a birth notice in the paper. So we have:

1. His mother was a US citizen, so he was automatically one as well (the Naturalization Act of 1790 and the Fourteenth Amendment).
2. There's no Kenyan paperwork or birth certificate.
3. The parents couldn't have afforded the trip.
4. There wasn't time to fly to Kenya, give birth and come back before their disappearance was noticed.
5. Pregnancy doesn't give one a exact delivery time. There's no way to predict the time of birth closely enough to fly to Kenya and back.
6. There are hospital records and a birth notice in a local newspaper showing a US birth.

Birthers, when presented with facts such as these, will shift focus to the fact that the Obama campaign didn't release the relevant paperwork during the 2008 election. Some will point out that John McCain had to prove he was an American citizen (his mother was actually interviewed to verify his citizenship) and it is true that the Hillary Clinton campaign did float the idea that McCain wasn't an American citizen because he was born on a US naval base in the Panama Canal Zone back when the US owned the canal. One of the things that drives the Birther movement is the outrage that a Republican war hero has to prove his citizenship but a Democrat with a foreigner for a father doesn't.

The Obama campaign was pretty savvy to use the Birther movement to make their opponents look like tin-foil-wearing morons. Several times in the first two years of his presidency, Obama's people made jokes about the Birthers or friendly news outlets would bring up Birthers when the Tea Party movement was gathering strength. After the 2010 election, Obama's close friend, who just happened to be governor of Hawaii, suddenly announced that he was going to stop these Birthers and release Obama's long-form birth certificate. For almost two weeks, his people were releasing odder and odder reports, from finding it to losing it to firing the Hawaii Secretary of State (who was in charge of keeping birth certificates, among other things) for an unknown reason and then finally admitting what many of us knew all along, that it couldn't be released without Obama's written approval. This circus managed to crowd out stories about how the Democrats had the greatest loss of Congressional seats since 1938 and they had lost the House.

Obama finally allowed a picture of the long-form birth certificate to be released after Trump had been ranting about it for a few weeks. Trump, who was trying to use the issue to make himself a Republican presidential candidate, saw interest in his political future quickly fade away. Recently, Joe Arpaio, a controversial Arizona sheriff under Federal investigation for racial bias and civil rights violations, has decided to investigate Obama's birth certificate because...? Arpaio has been marketing himself as 'America's Toughest Sheriff' for decades and is known for stunts like putting a 'Vacancy' sign in front of his jail, making the male inmates wear pink underwear and so on. He's also been fighting county government officials and judges for money and power to the point where it's a pretty ugly mess.

I think the appeal of the Birther movement is that of the Magic Reset Button. Liberals held onto the belief that Bush stole the 2000 election in the hope that some smoking gun would be found and he would be removed from office (they never seemed to realize that, if W was removed, Cheney would take over). Republicans had their Magic Reset Button in the 1990s with Whitewater and Zippergate. The 9/11 Truther movement (that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job or the government knew about them and failed to act) is a more recent one that seems to cut across political leanings. The Magic Reset Button has been around for well over a century- really, the Civil War, it could be argued, was the result of the South pushing the Magic Reset Button under the belief that the Founders simply forgot to include how to leave the US somewhere in the Constitution. The Magic Reset Button, if pushed, will right massive wrongs and make horrible things not happen. If Obama isn't an American, he will be removed from office (and Joe Biden would become president, something no one wants) and every decision he made will be reversed (actually, there would be a Constitutional crisis worse than anything since the Civil War) and...? Magic Reset Buttons aren't real but their appeal is simple and childlike, that the bad thing will go away. The Truthers are hoping that there are millions of Islamic fundamentalists dedicated to destroying us. The anti-Clinton-ers of the 1990s were hoping that history would stop with the fall of the Soviet Union and we'd be able to go back to a 1950s that never was or a Gilded Age where we could ignore the rest of the world.

The truth of the matter is that Obama is the legitimate President of the United States. I feel he's a horrible one, one that shares few beliefs with me or the majority of America. He lies constantly, is petulant and arrogant and refuses to look at any other viewpoint. He's skated on his looks and voice and personal narrative and now that he has the hardest job on the planet, he votes 'Present' and goes off to golf. There is no Magic Reset Button.