Ace at Ace of Spades HQ begins with former Gov. Huckabee's recent mis-speech and swerves into a politically-cynical (and thus entertaining) run at the "birther" kerfuffle.
Money quote(s):
"In an interview, Huckabee alluded to Obama growing up in Kenya; he apparently mixed up Obama's complicated richly textured tapestry of nuanced diversity lineage and background, and misspoke.
He immediately clarified that he had misspoke."
Easy enough to mis-speak like that, I suppose. The truth, roughly, is that after being born in Hawaii, the president spent several of his earlier years in Indonesia before moving back to Hawaii where he completed his pre-tertiary education. Not being the president's biographer, I'll leave it at that.
"I have a weird take on the Birth Certificate Conspiracy Theory. Few share it. On one hand, I do not believe in it, at all. I disbelieve it for cosmological reasons, for one thing -- that Obama could be evicted from office due to this strikes me as such a Magic Button Happy Ending that I would almost be forced to confess the active hand of an Intelligent Designer in our political disputes, which I strongly doubt -- and for more specific reasons, there is evidence of his Hawaiian birth (notices in newspapers) that seems so fortuitous to seem just too unlikely to be credited.
On the other hand, those who reject such conspiracy theories tend to be convinced that the whole fooferall is political poison and will convince the world that we are nothing but crazy cranks.
I don't believe that last part. I believe this conspiracy theory is wrong (and often dumb) but politically pretty harmless. I base this on an imaginary conversation I have with a hypothetical, low-information, low-partisan-leaning independent voter I imagine in my head:"
Be sure to read the hypothetical dialogue he provides at his post.
I rather like the rejection of the "Magic Button Happy Ending" on grounds of it being a reverse-Occam's Razor.
"I do think that is why this whole Birth Certificate Conspiracy Theory has not, in fact, harmed conservatives, despite the media attempting to harm conservatives with it at every turn.
It's just that anyone who hears all this is going to ask, as my Hypothetical Independent kept asking, "Okay, I accept this is all crazy... but... why won't he release it?"
There's no answer to that. No one ever says why this is so outrageous a request. No one offers any plausible justification for withholding it.
No one ever asks the President. No one. Ever.
We have a secret, and we don't even have the courtesy of a cover story to explain the secret away.
If you act secretively, it is not crazy to imagine you have secrets.
This is Obama's problem. It is Obama's choice to withhold this document. That's a decision he made -- why? No idea. The White House won't even offer a cover story to explain why such a benign record must be guarded like Area 51.
It is not the problem of Obama's opponents to prop him up and explain away his decision. It is not our duty to make excuses for him, or to postulate reasons why he's withholding a trivial birth record.
It's the guy with the secret who has the problem.
And this is what annoys me in the media coverage of this: They demand that Republicans swear on a stack of Bibles to affirm facts they have no knowledge of while steadfastly refusing to ask the guy actually concealing the records which would end the controversy why, The Hell, he is continuing to conceal them."
The truth will out. The truth always outs. Always. Sometimes you have to wait for it, sometimes you have to really be paying attention to notice it's gotten out, but it always gets there eventually. Always.
What will it be? No idea. But I think Ace has nudged the conversation (such as it is) in a useful enough direction. For my part, I'm inclined to believe the original Hawaiian birth certificate is perfectly genuine and that the president is Constitutionally eligible to hold office as a natural born citizen. I'm also inclined to favor the notion that for some reason of political expedience or embarrassment, the president doesn't want the original document released. And that declining to release that document falls more into the realm, at this late date, of being either due to force of habit or because the president has one more presidential campaign to run and doesn't want whatever it might be to become an issue.
Although at this point, having kept whatever it is under wraps for this long would probably be the more politically damaging issue.
"This is Obama's problem. Not Boehner's, not Huckabee's. Not even Chris Matthews'. There is one person in the entire world who is legally permitted to release the document in question. And that's not me, not John Boehner, and not Mike Huckabee.
Obama won't release it. He's decided that it's better to have people speculate about the reasons for his refusal to release basic documents about himself than to release those documents and dispel all speculation.
That's his choice. And if his word is that it is worse for him to release it than it is for him to not release it, I take him at his word.
And it's not my goddamn job or anyone else's to continuing spinning in support of his secrecy on the matter."
The president has a passport record. We know this because people were disciplined for improperly accessing the passport application records of several presidential candidates (including Sen. McCain, then-Sen. Clinton, and then-Sen. Obama) before he was even the Democratic nominee. So someone with the training and authority to do so pronounced on the president's citizenship long before he was president, and if there had been a problem with it there'd have been a passport fraud investigation by the Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
(And I don't believe for a second such a thing could have been kept secret for all these years.)
2 comments:
I always assumed when I mailed in my passport applications along with the documents that showed my citizenship that the State Department passport types made copies or images of the documents and stored them along with the application.
Is that a back door way to see the document that Obama doesn't want anybody to see?
@Curtis:
Maybe yes, maybe no. Lots of applications received through acceptance officials at post offices don't include primary documentation to be scanned, only information from the forms themselves.
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