Starting back when Barack Obama first announced his candidacy to run for the office of President of the United States there has been a growing movement of people who are convinced that Barack Obama is not a naturally born U.S. citizen. These folks have been recently dubbed as the “birthers.” Birthers are like truthers only slightly less annoying. They’re quasi-conspiracy nuts who believe that the President’s Hawaiian birth certificate is a forgery and he was really born in Kenya. If Obama was born in Kenya then he would be Constitutionally ineligible to run for or hold the office of President.
Birthers like truthers base their assertions on disparate bits of information to extrapolate a version of reality that agrees with whatever nutty idea they believe. They do this while conveniently ignoring simple common sense and critical thinking. An example of this would be the DNC’s vetting of Senator Obama as a candidate. Barack Obama officially began campaigning for the presidency back in 2007, but unofficially he started much earlier. The books Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope were early campaign propaganda to promote himself as a candidate. Given that Barack Obama had his eye on the White House since 2004, the DNC had plenty of time to vet him and make certain he was eligible to hold the office. The DNC would not have invested so much of their own money and resources for a candidate who couldn’t even lawfully hold the office. I’d be willing to bet they vetted him for the job long before his first book was even published. It’s extremely unlikely that Obama would have come as far as he had without producing a valid birth certificate. Hell, you can’t even get a passport or a drivers license without a valid birth certificate. The arguement is not even close to being a rational one.
Let’s play dumbasses advocate and assume that Barack Obama was in fact born in Kenya and not Hawaii. Lets assume the birthers find their holy grail in the form of his Kenyan birth certificate. What then? Would he just step down as President? If that were the case, we’d be stuck with President Biden. That prospect makes me almost able to feel the prospective self-inflicted gunshot wound in my head. I don’t think President Obama resigning would produce favorable results. If anything things might be worse. Joe Biden is a laughing stock that makes George W. Bush look like Thomas Jefferson.
Even if it can be proven that Barack Obama is not Constitutionally eligible to be President, it’s unlikely he will step down. The big mistake birthers make is they assume the Government will adhere to the rule of law as written in the Constitution. The Federal Government has spent the last 150 years wilfully ignoring the Constitution whenever is suits them. The Tenth Amendment was abandonned and torn asunder before the Civil War, the First Amendment is constantly under attack by culture warriors and politically correct thought police, the Fourth Amendment has been rendered null and void by the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, the Thirteenth Amendment is currently on the chopping block thanks to Congress’ desire for mandatory volenteerism, and the Second Amendment is constantly under fire (pun intended) due to assault weapons bans and other conditions. I doubt a small technicality regarding U.S. citizenship would give them even a moment’s pause.
So my message to all the birthers out there is that they need to knock it off. For one thing, they look and sound like a bunch of whackjobs. Remember only a few years ago when the truthers were foaming at the mouth with the Bush-centered conspiracy fantasies? These birthers are doing the same thing and looking equally ridiculous. Don’t be that guy. Besides, between his health care fiasco, the cap and trade swindle, and the stimulus bill with more pork in it than a package of bratwursts, one would think there are already enough legitimate greivances against Obama’s administration without making up a bunch of crap about where he happened to be born. Quit wasting your time. Quit sacrificing your credibility. Quit embarrassing yourselves and everyone else who disagrees with the President’s policies. The sooner you guys come back to reality, the harder it will be for the Obama disciples to dismiss his opponents as racist conspiracy nuts.