Pres. Barack Obama has a birthday coming up, a week from Tuesday. We hope he takes the day off—or even the whole week, the briefest of respites from his busy schedule of truncating our liberties while exhausting both the public coffers and our patience. The president’s birthday comes to mind because we recently spent some time looking at a photograph of his birth certificate, being held by Joe Miller of Factcheck.org, who took the time to examine it. President Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m, in Honolulu County, Hawaii, on the island of Oahu. The serial number on his birth certificate is 010641. Baby Barack’s birth was not heralded, as some of his partisans have suggested, by a star in the east, but it was heralded by the Honolulu Star, as well as the Honolulu Advertiser, each of which published birth announcements for young Mr. Obama.
Much foolishness has become attached to the question of President Obama’s place of birth, and a few misguided souls among the Right have indulged it. The myth that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president represents the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of his election and presidency disappear. We are used to seeing conspiracy theories from the Left, for instance among the one in three Democrats who believe that 9/11 was an inside job conducted with the foreknowledge of the Bush administration. We’ve seen everything under the sun blamed on Dick Cheney and Halliburton, and Rosie O’Donnell has given us much mirth with her metallurgical expertise, while Andrew Sullivan has beclowned himself and tarnished the good name of The Atlantic with his investigation into the “real” parentage of Trig Palin. Most notable, the Iraq War summoned the craziness in a big way, and there are those who still shudder over their espressos at the mention of the Carlyle Group. And there is a fair amount of crossover between those fixated on Obama’s birth certificate and the 9/11 “truthers” — lawyer Phil Berg, for instance, is a player in both worlds. There is nothing that President Obama’s coterie would enjoy more than to see the responsible Right become a mirror image of the loopy Left circa 2003.
The birth-certificate business is not a uniquely conservative phenomenon; the allegation that Obama was born in Kenya seems to have originated with a Hillary Clinton supporter at a blog called The Blue State. Either way, this fantasy is not particularly widespread within the conservative movement, but it has attracted enough interest that it needs to be addressed.
The fundamental fiction is that Obama has refused to release his “real” birth certificate. This is untrue. The document that Obama has made available is the document that Hawaiian authorities issue when they are asked for a birth certificate. There is no secondary document cloaked in darkness, only the state records that are used to generate birth certificates when they are requested.
If one applies for a United States passport, the passport office will demand a birth certificate. It defines this as an official document bearing “your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.” The Hawaiian birth certificate President Obama has produced—the document is formally known as a “certificate of live birth”—bears that information. It has been inspected by reporters, and several state officials have confirmed that the information in permanent state records is identical to that on the president’s birth certificate—which is precisely what one expects, of course, since the state records are used to generate those documents when they are requested. In other words, what President Obama has produced is the “real” birth certificate of myth and lore. The director of Hawaii’s health department and the registrar of records each has personally verified that the information on Obama’s birth certificate is identical to that in the state’s records, the so-called vault copy. Given that fact, we are loath even to engage the fanciful notion that President Obama was born elsewhere, contrary to the information on his birth certificate, but we note for the record that his mother was a native of Kansas, whose residents have been citizens of the United States for a very long time, and whose children are citizens of the United States as well.
The attention paid to President Obama’s place of birth is not unprecedented. In fact, it may be the only thing President Obama has in common with Pres. Chester Arthur, whose opponents whispered that he had been born in Canada. A number of unsuccessful presidential candidates—George Romney, Barry Goldwater, and Lowell Weicker among them—actually were born outside of the United States (in Mexico, the Arizona Territory, and Paris, respectively) to American parents and thereby into American citizenship. If the conspiracy theorists have evidence that President Obama went through the naturalization process, let them show it. But there is no such evidence, because this theory is based on unreality, as two minutes’ examining the claims of its proponents reveals. The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that a lack of evidence for the theory is taken as yet more evidence for the theory. Indeed, the maddening thing about dealing with conspiracy hobbyists of this or any sort is the ever-shifting nature of their argument and their alleged evidence: Never mind the birth certificate, his step-grandmother said he was born in Kenya! (No, she didn’t.)
One of the unfortunate consequences of this red-herring discussion is that there are plenty of questions about Obama’s background and history that we would like to have answered. In spite of two books of memoirs, there remain murky areas in his biography. And when it comes to those college transcripts, count us among those who’d love to know whether Dr. Bailout ever took an advanced economics class and how he performed in it.
Barack Obama may prefer European-style socialized health care. He may consider himself a citizen of the Earth and sometimes address his audiences as “people of the world,” as though he were born not in another country but on another planet. Like Bruce Springsteen, he has a lot of bad political ideas; but he was born in the U.S.A.
It is great to see that the conservative media does not buy into this failed conspiracy. Coupled with the unanimous passage of a bill Monday whose wording included "Whereas the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, was born in Hawaii...", it looks like the House of Representatives, Republicans and Democrats, are making a clear statement also.
If one applies for a United States passport, the passport office will demand a birth certificate. It defines this as an official document bearing “your full name, the full name of your parent(s), date and place of birth, sex, date the birth record was filed, and the seal or other certification of the official custodian of such records.”
this is a treat. Lt Quaerles "invaded Obama's Privacy and checked out this "passport file"
He got shot dead.
Quote:
An embarrassed State Department admitted today that the passport files of all three presidential candidates -- Sens. John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- have been breached by its employees.
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Obama reacts to revelation that candidate passport files have been breached. The bombshell announcement came within hours of the admission that Obama's personal file was improperly accessed several times earlier this year and no one was notified of the breach.
Walter Annenberg announced that he was making a $500 million grant to cities across the nation to put towards public school reform. Bill Ayers led the group that brought $49.2 million to Chicago and formed the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. The kick-off in January 1995 was attended by the governor of Illinois and the mayor of Chicago, as well as many other luminaries. The first chairman of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge was Barack Obama, a post he held until 1999 when he stepped down and remained on the board. Bill Ayers worked closely with the Challenge as a leader of the newly-formed Chicago School Reform Collaborative.
Is No Radical Left Behind the sort of Hope and Change on which Obama wants to campaign?
Obama was on the board of The woods foundation. Just follow the money twisp.
non-partisian? FactCheck.org is strongly left-wing, as far as the 2008 POTUS election. FactCheck.org overwhelmingly takes positions supporting the Obama ticket. Is there any hope of FactCheck.org remaining neutral/credible in this election if its funding comes from the Annenberg Foundation, which also funded/supported the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) (also referred to as the Annenberg Challenge to Chicago) with Barrack Obama as its head? Iamst (talk) 00:51, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
Criminals give other criminals in their own family glowing references.
Sounds like desperation to me, coadie. All your talking won't change the facts.
Where is the document?
You may be getting the impression i am hard to decieve. Two of the professions I practice in have fraud and decept detection continuing ed. I am not on law enforcement.
You are incredibly obvious. Every post is taking conflict of interest up a level.
Even granny won't admit he was born in HI . She may need more life insurance.
You may be getting the impression i am hard to decieve. Two of the professions I practice in have fraud and decept detection continuing ed. I am not on law enforcement.
You are incredibly obvious. Every post is taking conflict of interest up a level.
Even granny won't admit he was born in HI . She may need more life insurance.
Both your posts are hilarious. I am telling you, you are getting more creative with each one.
It is great that the conservative media and politicians are speaking out against this shabbily concocted conspiracy.
For future reference coadie, try and believe in a conspiracy that takes at least more than 10 minutes to be discredited. I mean, really, it just reflects badly on you. Got to pick you battles, buddy. Just looking out for you.
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