A creature of their own

Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers (#68) that:

“the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in [American] councils. How could they better gratify this, than by raising a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union?”

 I would think such sentiment  informed the Constitutional requirement for a US president to be "natural born."  Of late however, the definition of natural born has been kneaded into whatever shape is needed to make our current president, born on American Soil to a natural born and Caucasian mother, seem illegitimate while his first opponent, Panamanian born John McCain , never had his suitability challenged, nor indeed did Mitt Romney who although born in the US may have descended from illegal aliens. Odd indeed as so many Republicans would like to change the constitution to deny citizenship to those born here, but to parents who are not citizens.  Situational ethics and silly arguments all and perhaps colored by racism as the only one challenged was the only one with an African father.  Romney's Mexican immigrants were white and thus all right as the saying goes.

If in fact the Constitutional requirement was to serve to keep foreign "creatures" out of office and if in fact, such a circumstance motivated the "birther" madness, there is a disturbing dissonance when one considers the eagerness of Republicans to allow unlimited campaign funding from offshore corporations to finance a creature of their own.  A cynic might be tempted to propose that when such domestic creatures claim that the objection is about the law, that it's really about Obama. It's really about racism.

The cynicism might be affirmed when one considers the proposed 2016 ascendant, Canadian born Senator  Ted Cruz (R-T.)    Now Cruz may have had a US born mother, just as Mr. Obama had, but Obama does not hold a foreign passport as Cruz does.  Does dual citizenship mean divided loyalty?  Is that more or less of a concern when one has a foreign loyalty to a country where most people are Caucasian and Christian?  Res ipsa loquitur, I should think, or freakin' obvious for those with undivided loyalty to English.

Cruz's father, Cuban born Rafael Cruz was a Cuban citizen and a legal resident in Canada when Ted was born and thus Ted is automatically a Canadian citizen at birth under Canadian law as well as a legal US citizen at birth -- because his mother was a US citizen.  He has never renounced Canadian citizenship and yet his spokeswoman claims with a kind of logic suspiciously alien that he has no Canadian citizenship to renounce.  He does. 

Perhaps that's a simple misunderstanding or perhaps it's the kind of duplicity and denialism that has come to define the faux-conservative, morally impoverished and greedy for power creatures of  the Republican ascendency. No matter where Mr. Cruz was born and no matter where his loyalties may lie, Cuba, Canada, the United States of America, he's a creature of their own.

Tricky Rick from Texas Holds Forth on the President’s Birth Certificate

"I'm really not worried about the president's birth certificate. It's fun to poke at him a little bit and say, how 'bout let's see your grades and your birth certificate." (Rick Perry as quoted in a CNBC interview; see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/25/rick-perry-obama-birth-certificate_n_1030157.html)

See, here's the thing, guv -- when you talk like that, even if you say it with a disarming Texas grin, people might just get the idea that you don't really believe a word of the birther nonsense but are willing to keep repeating it for the fun of the thing. Problem is, a lot of the rubes and certifiable cases out there who still talk this way DO believe it -- every mad-hatter word of it, in fact. So when you imply that you're not quite serious, they get upset and you lose potential votes. Even people who deserve to be talked down to don't like it when you talk down to them and snicker about it right in front of them.

Of course, there's another way to view the matter: once you reveal that you're approximately as sophisticated as a middle-school bully -- you know, someone who gets up every blessed morning 100% prepared to toss around baseless insults to hurt some other person’s feelings – or jes’ to “poke at 'im,” as y'all might put it -- you stand to gain considerably in the eyes of others who fit the same schoolyard profile. And unfortunately, being that sort of person is pretty much standard fare for the Republican base. From that perspective, I suppose, you've got both hat and cattle workin' for ya, podnah! You know, “strategery”!

A serious question -- is it possible for the current Republican Party to put its faith in anyone who is NOT essentially an overgrown middle-school bully in an expensive suit or dress?

It's time to grow up, America

Listen to this message. And remember one thing: the birther message that Donald Trump was able to ride was only possible because Barack Obama was black.

Would it have been possible for anyone, at any time, to make an ignorant claim like this, that Obama wasn't truly an American, if he had, in fact, been white? If his father had been Barry O'Bama, an Irishman, who'd gone back to the ancestral shores of Ulster, would anyone have been able to carry this ignorant, racist message as far as Donald Trump (and his media representative, Joseph Farah) were able to flog it?

Would anyone have cared if Obama was a white man?

(OK, I'll even add a caveat - "a white man with no Russian background"? Because, yes, they're that stupid...)

If Barack Obama wasn't different from "you and me" - if he wasn't "the other" - if he didn't seem "foreign"...

GOD DAMN IT!! If he wasn't black!

If Barry O'Bama was a white man raised in Chicago, would anybody have gone to the ignorant, racist extremes that the GOP has gone in the last 4 years?

Yes, if you ever worried about the birth certificate of the duly elected president of the United States, you are a useless, inbred racist fuck. You might as well pull out your bed-sheets with the eye holes cut out.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

The realm of possibility

I wonder if I could convince the IRS that I never was an American Citizen. Perhaps I could try the method that convinced the100 million or so of America's stupidest that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. After all my birth certificate looks no different from his, save for the name and State. Send for your certificate as you will have to do if you want a passport or to apply for Social Security benefits and see for yourself. Odds are it will look pretty much the same and not like the old handwritten things one used to get once upon a time when the coloreds knew their place or else.

"I mean, someone is going to have to come forward with nailed down testimony that he was born in place B, wherever that is. You know, the speculation is Kenya. And that doesn't seem beyond the realm of possibility."

And by "nailed down" testimony we mean a valid birth certificate, confirmed by the vital statistics department of any state -- just like the one Barack Obama has shown us and that Hawaii attests to, Says Virginia's new Attorney General.

Yes, I know, you don't have to be a genius to be an Attorney General in the State of Virginia and as AG Ken Cuccinelli proves, you don't have to be much smarter than what you'll find in the Richmond zoo -- and no I'm not talking about the keepers. If your head's way up "place B" you'll do fine. It's within the realm of possibility that Obama was born in Kenya, says he and I don't think he's referring to the realm of quantum physics wherein there is also a possibility that he will disappear and be reassembled on Alpha Centauri.

Why even consider the possibility, seeing that the State of Hawaii's official records and official record keepers and the Honolulu newspapers affirm he was born there: seeing as it's been checked and re-checked and confirmed? Because, as some would tell you "where there's smoke, there's fire" and as others would say: "people are saying." Of course where there's smoke, it could be a smokescreen and "people are saying" because they're desperately in denial that a black man could be President and because the media are feasting on that bit of carrion and won't give it up. All in all, the odds are about the same that young Cucchi and I were born in Nairobi as that the President was, and those odds are close enough to zero to be zero.

Of course the dapper young Cuchster was happy to add to the insanity by proposing that someone break a law that the President signed and then take it to court on the basis that the President isn't the President, but probably unbeknownst to him it's been tried, was thrown out of court and the attorney found in contempt. As I said you don't have to have anywhere near three digits in your IQ to rise to the top in Virginia. Put Gucci loafers and a swank suit on a blue-assed baboon and he'll do fine as long as he flings shit at the president of the United States.

Here come the Judge - again

Orly Taitz -- always in the news. Perhaps you remember my Sept. 16th post about how Judge Clay Land threw her "Birther" suit out of court with a warning that she would face consequences for any further frivolous suits. Ms. Taitz is not so easily dismissed, it seems and Judge Land not kindly disposed toward a motion she filed asking the Judge to reconsider -- at least not toward the part in which she called him a traitor and claimed that the 11th circuit court was subject to "external control" and political pressure from an illegitimate president.

At this point, even the Army Captain on whose behalf the suit was filed has bailed out and apparently can't wait to get to Afghanistan. Taitz now has 14 days to show the infuriated judge why she shouldn't be fined $10,000 for contempt. It will be interesting to see how deep a hole this rabid pit bull can dig herself into. Ten thousand seems a very small fine considering how much her insane crusade has cost us all and I'm hoping she can parlay it into some serious jail time.

Here come the Judge!

Orly Taitz - the name seems designed for mockery, but anyone so inclined hardly needs such a prop. Yes, she's the one who is still filing lawsuits, using our clogged-up courts as a soapbox to give the voices in her head an audience: the voices that say Barack Obama was born In Kenya on a variety of dates both before and after it became a Republic and is ineligible to be president. So far it hasn't been working out well. That may change.

She's been serving as council for US Army Captain Connie Rhodes who volunteered for service in Afghanistan so he and Taitz could file suit for the right to refuse the orders he requested to be given. Other than the fake birth certificate Judge Clay Land of the US District Court in Columbus, Georgia says is inadmissible since she paid to have it made up (the fact that it's dated incorrectly and got the name of the country wrong doesn't help its credibility) she has presented nothing but a series of diatribes and no evidence whatever that could refute the State of Hawaii's certification that Obama was born in Honolulu.

It's not good to try fooling the judge. Clay threw it, and her apparently, out of court saying she:

“has presented no credible evidence and has made no reliable factual allegations to support her unsubstantiated, conclusory allegations and conjecture that President Obama is ineligible to serve as president of the United States. Instead, she uses her complaint as a platform for spouting political rhetoric, such as her claims that the president is ‘an illegal usurper, an unlawful pretender, an unqualified impostor."

WTVM-TV in Columbus reported, that the judge also stated that Orly Taitz,

“will be subject to counsel sanctions for bringing any future actions in his court which are similarly frivolous.”

Think you can slow down a wingnut that easy? Sorry, the Taitz has inflicted another suit in the US district court in Santa Ana, CA using another, differently dated, bogus certificate she also claims to have obtained by bribery in Kenya and other servicemen who claim they won't go because Obama isn't really president.

Will Judge David O. Carter give her case the same heave ho? Don't be too sure. Judge Carter, a former U.S. Marine, repeated several times that this case is very serious and must be resolved quickly so that the troops know their Commander in Chief is eligible to hold that position and issue lawful orders to our military "in this time of war." He's already refused the Obama team's request for dismissal. The plan, according to Jeff Schwilk, founder, San Diego Minutemen who somehow seems to have a voice in this, is to force Obama to reveal his true birth certificate - right, the one he revealed a long time ago and which was attested to by the governor of Hawaii and their director of vital records.

"Taitz did a great job, winning some huge victories today, she was fearless!”

said Schwilk, to the SonoranNews.com I'm sure she was. A sane person would have been terrified.

Am I mocking the innocent here? I'll leave it to you, but we can be sure that we will be hearing from people who condemn this disrespect for fraudulent, seditious cases and believe every word of these charges. Oh, those Liberals! All they have is mockery!

Birthers, believers and bananas

There are those -- a lot of those, for whom any hint of apology for or embarrassment about the United States of its actions is treason and unforgivable. That's unforgivable and perhaps sometimes treasonous since it tends not only to reward, but promote our bad behavior.

Of course there is no way that I can apologize to the world for the "Birther" phenomenon, its psychotic proponents and demented followers, but it's surely embarrassing to contemplate the way the world sees us, which must be very much how we would see some naked savages from Papua New Guinea who happened to have nuclear weapons they were constantly threatening us with. Pardon my unforgivable frankness, but I'm embarrassed to be an American -- once again.

Of course it's worse in the South, the former Slave States where segregation, lynching and Jim Crow policies were only stopped with great effort and physical force in my youth and where even NASCAR and college football take a back seat to believing as a popular sport. Believing without evidence generates disbelieving despite the evidence and so early poll data in Virginia seems to show that almost half of Virginians believe Barak Obama was born in Kenya and that the official State data showing he wasn't, was planted over 40 years earlier in the hopes that he could one day run for president.

". . . a result making me want to bang my head against the table, the first round of calls for our Virginia poll this afternoon founds voters in the state almost evenly split on whether they thought the President was born in the US"

said PPP communications director Tom Jensen. I can well imagine.

Whether Public Policy Polling, who is conducting this poll is or is not a good prognosticator or data gatherer, responses to their announcement at their web site were centered around personal attacks and obscene comments about the snottiness of elite liberals rather than the data or the apparent insanity and delusional condition of the Birthers. Not one of them gives a damn about facts. Not one is capable of self doubt.

Of course believers rarely if ever choose what to believe without assistance and an examination of the obviously mental inventors of the libel such as Orly Taitz can make you want to put a noose around your neck -- or hers depending on your proclivities. If this woman gave you a used Rolls, would you even sit in it without a hazmat suit? None of the "birthers" would be imaginative enough to cook up this story, they got it the way Germany got Fascism: from a band of brownshirt organizers and disruptors and hooligans.

No problem for the bigots, for the believers, for the people who equate fact and reason, law and decency with fascism: Southern Whites, who for over 150 years have stood on their beliefs, on what they have been told by hatemongers to use against freedom for anyone but white males. No problem at all. If it feels good, believe it. If challenged by facts, slime the challengers, but never give up, never surrender, never stop hating.

Fox 2

The call for CNN to fire Lou Dobbs has been spreading, from SPLC to Media Matters and of course The Swash Zone. Although there have been a few encouraging signs, like a memo from CNN President John Klein to Dobbs' staffers saying that:

"It seems this story is dead- because anyone who still is not convinced doesn't really have a legitimate beef."

Dobbs is still far from being dead and far from being fired.

As Greg Sargent writes in Plum Line, Klein's position is that CNN is off the hook since they've already reported the truth on other programs -- and even on Dobbs' show while he was gone. What he's apparently saying is "we report, you decide." As at Fox News, it appears that the technique is to give you some lies, some distortions and some truth - just enough to make the political point of view seem valid -- and then "let you decide." In short it's just fine to broadcast anything, even if proved false, even if it jeopardises the country and aids it's enemies. They don't feel they have to side with honesty at all. You decide. Enquiring minds want to know.

John Klein pals around with terrorists and Lou Dobbs was born in Guatemala and is not a citizen and both are registered agents for North Korea -- I can't be sure they're not, after all. You decide.

In an interview with Klein, Sargent was told the objection to CNN's repeating scurrilous, unfounded lies with respect was all political.

“I understand that people with a partisan point of view from one extreme or another might get annoyed that certain subjects are aired.”

Truth is an extreme position and truth is partisan and so lies should be equally respected. Maybe it's not enough to fire Dobbs. I'm taking advantage of my television's ability to block channels and as of now CNN is outta here. I also think it's worth writing everyone that advertises there.