Blog or Die!

Honolulu Advertiser columnist Jerry Burris wrote in an article entitled: “Obama’s American: Believe it”:

One conspiracy theorist is convinced Obama was born in his father’s homeland of Kenya (somehow mother and father slipped away from their studies in Hawai’i to get back to Africa in time for the birth of their son, then zipped back to the Islands and began building this false paper trail).

This would be laughable enough except for the fact that it shows there are still people out there who don’t believe Obama is “American” enough to be president. They’re willing to believe anything. After all, he has the “wrong” name, comes from the “wrong” place and is the “wrong” color. …

No one, including myself on this blog, is using the “R” word, “racism”. Sure there are white supremacists out there on web sites like AltMedia.info and StormFront.org who make no apologies about their views on non-white people, but most of the objection to Obama is being made in with smears (like guilt by association) and quasi-legal arguments about eligibility.

The question, though, is would these canards get as much traction as they do if Barack Obama was white and had a European name? I think maybe Mr. Burris has a point.

A very pertinent article appears on Salon.com that adds another group to the anti-Obama bandwagon, the conspiracy theorists. A number of the prominent supporters of Obama Citizenship Denial have a history of conspiracy theory beliefs.

Someone handed me a letter the other day denying that Obama was qualified to be president. I thought it was a printed-out email and I was more than a little surprised to learn that it came in the US Mail. The back sheet was a petition to be signed and sent somewhere but also a solicitation for money with check boxes for amounts up to $10,000! As I visit web sites like StopObama.org and ObamaCrimes.org, I find they are asking for money too, or selling merchandise.

Obama Citizenship Denial has become a cottage industry, a boutique of smears catering to all the constituencies that want Obama to be unable to govern. I wonder how much money they are making.

I for one will not be mailing in my $10,000 check.

One need but look at my blog to see how much time I have personally wasted on Obama Citizenship Denial. This subject has now moved to the “conspiracy theory” world (where long-resolved objections are repeated, and evidence dismissed).  Most of what’s written on this subject is carp, but I want to summarize what I find were the main issues, and as Shakespeare says, “by opposing, end them”.

• Obama Birth Certificate Denial – Barack Obama posted a scanned image of a birth certificate on his web site and provided images to others. FactCheck.org handled the certificate and published close-up photos of it on their web site. Objections to the Certificate include:
  • The Certificate is a forgery.
    • A string of anonymous individuals claiming expertise, notably one TechDude and a Dr. Rod Polarik (not a real name?), claim indisputable and incontrovertible proof of forgery. The problem here is that none of the self-proclaimed experts have access to to the physical copy of Obama certificate, nor do they have access to technical information on how Hawaiian birth certificates are produced. The result is mostly guesswork comparing scanned images created with with differing software and hardware. Polarik’s analysis directly contradicts TechDude, and Polarik’s own analysis is based on unreasonable assumptions (like Hawaii only owns one state seal embosser and only one registrar rubber stamp). The Hawaii Department of Health issued a press release saying that the Director of the Hawaii Department of Health and the Registrar of Vital Statistics examined the original certificate held by the State and announced that it was filed according to law. If what Obama published were a forgery, I cannot conceive of these high officials (in a Republican administration) failing to say something. Of course I can’t conceive of a US Senator forging a birth certificate either. Comments by the two examiners sound like exchanges of posturing adolescents than serious scientists. For further information debunking the forensics see:
      • Bad Science: How Not To Do Image Analysis
      • Bad Science: How Not To Do Image Analysis Part II
  • The Certificate “proves nothing”
    This comes from the misreading of various Hawaiian laws, confusion over Hawaiian Homelands, and one real bit of Hawaiian law about registering infants born out of state to residents. That law is §338-17.8 Certificates for children born out of State. However, the law wasn’t passed until 1982, two decades after Obama’s birth, and anyway Obama’s birth certificate says quite plainly that the location of his birth was Honolulu.
  • Obama won’t release his “real certificate”
    This theory relies on the fact that the certificate Obama posted is a certified computer abstract of his birth information, not a photocopy of the record filed by the hospital at his birth and registered by the state. It suggests that one is “real” and one is useless. Hawaiian law says otherwise: §338-13: “Copies of the contents of any certificate on file in the department, certified by the department shall be considered for all purposes the same as the original” including those produced by “computer printout”.
  • The certificate has been altered
    This argument goes something like: “The Obama Certificate shows what Hawaiian records say NOW, but the record could have been changed and the original say something quite different.” This possibility is excluded by Hawaiian law which requires all certificates so changed to be “marked distinctly” as “altered” (§338-16).
  • Obama’s grandmother in Kenya says Obama was born there, and that she was present
    The grandmother tape actually says that she was present at the birth of “her son” (Barak Obama Sr), not her grandson. You might say, it makes no sense for her to say that she was present at the birth of her own son, but actually Sarah Obama is not Barak’s biological mother, but rather his step mother. In an African village it would not be unusual for many women of the village to be present at a birth. (See also my article, “The Smoking Grandmother”.)
  • Obama is hiding something
    The important thing, the Constitutional requirement, is that Obama be born in the USA and that’s all that matters.
• Obama Lost His Citizenship
  Here we travel down the twisted road of misinterpretations of immigration law. I know more about birth certificates, but I will present some information on the second fork of Obama Citizenship Denial. 

   

  • Obama was not a natural-born citizen because he was born with dual US-British citizenship
    This is the essence of the Donofrio lawsuit [now refused by the US Supreme Court]. It claims that according to British law since Obama’s father was a British citizen, then so was his son by jus sanguinis, and this is true. The argument then says says that undivided loyalty was the foundation for the “natural born” clause in the Constitution — that a President must be American both by soil and by blood. Of course, the Constitution doesn’t say any such thing and has never been interpreted in that way. In essence, the claim says all children of immigrants (or even one) has divided loyalty and cannot be president. The Supreme Court (in United States v Wong Kim Ark) has also affirmed that anyone born in the United (with the usual exceptions for diplomets, etc) are citizens. All competent legal opinion agrees that being born in the United States is sufficient to be natural born, and MOST competent legal opinion holds that just having one or more US citizen parents alone is sufficient. A number of law school citations appear at the end of this article to back up my conclusion about legal opinion.
  • Obama lost his citizenship by becoming an Indonesian Citizen
    The argument from the Berg lawsuit goes that when Obama became an Indonesian citizen (a country that doesn’t allow dual citizenship) he must have given up his US Citizenship (and made himself no longer “natural born”). Note that there is no Indonesian government documentation I know of that Obama ever became an Indonesian citizen. Whatever Indonesian law might say, US law does allow dual citizenship, and makes it virtually impossible for a small child to renounce his citizenship and impossible for a parent to do it for him (Obama left Indonesia at age 10). Some may argue that the relevant law is what was in force at the time, the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, but that doesn’t work either for several reasons too complicated for this summary, but detailed here.

I think that covers it. Those who want to research further can look up the sources in the links in this article. As for me, unless something new surfaces, I’m done.

References:

• Yale Law Journal on Natural Born
• WikiPedia on “Natural Born”
• Michigan Law Review on Natural Born
• United States v Wong Kim Ark
• Chicago Tribune on Hawaii Health Department comments
• Obama Grandmother Audio Recording