Posted by
Bill Crawford on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 9:20:30 AM
...But I understand where they are coming from.
There are only four qualifications for President in the Constitution: native born, 35 years of age, 14 years of residence here and winner of a majority of Electoral votes. If you are a critic of George W. Bush or Sarah Palin, intelligence is often a fifth qualifier, but we can't all be originalists.
The native born part has never been an issue before- all the Presidents of my lifetime have been multi-generational natives. Obama was a question because his father was Kenyan and neither one of his parents had deep roots here.
The Birther people have been fed by one big issue: nobody has been able to provide an original birth certificate for the man. Hawaii has been nice enough to dump one from their muni files on anybody who asked (until about a year ago, when they stopped because of the volume). That and a birth announcement in a local newspaper are supposed to be enough to shut everybody up.
Mind you, I said I am not a Birther. That is to say, once he was sworn in, the questioning became at best unconstructive and at worst, dangerous. Trade agreements and negotiations with foriegn countries held as possibly null and vacant because the President was unconstitutionally sworn? Are you crazy? He won the election, the best thing to do is let it go.
The time for this investigation was the spring and summer of 2008. Unfortunately, all the Obama acolytes in politics and the press were taking the tack at the time that this was a dead issue. Not only that, anybody who insisted on raising it was hooted into the same conspiratorial ash heap as those who thought it untoward that Obama would sit in a church pew once a week for twenty years and not absorb any of the crap that the Reverend Wright was slinging.
Was it that important to elect him? Even at the cost of having this stupidity hanging over his head now? Next time, can we do a little investigation, before we spend our energies cheerleading candidates in the news divisions?
The answer is, probably not. Investigations are for those we hate, and the bulk of the press people who fall in this hole are....moral relativists. That keeps coming back, doesn't it?