Obama is a natural-born citizen of the United States. Get over it!

Oh for freak's sake. I spent eight years shaking my head in disbelief at the demented and deranged rantings of the Left suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome, and now it's parts of the Right who have gone stark raving bonkers. Maybe some of them need a good bonk to get it out of their systems? That's as close to naturopathy as I get. Briefly, some on the right in the United States, unable to reconcile themselves to the fact that Barack Obama won the general election fair and square, have fallen like witless suckers for an insane conspiracy theory that he does not satisfy the constitutional requirement that a president must be a 'natural born' citizen of the United States. This seems to mean either a person is born in the United States or, if outside of the US, born to American parents or an American parent (under certain circumstances, as is the case with Senator John McCain, who was born in Panama). Much of this nonsense hinges on the supposed refusal of Mr Obama to release his Hawaiian birth "certificate," even though the sighted "certification" of live birth - a legal document in Hawaii - clearly shows him being born in Honolulu. No one has produced even a sliver of evidence that somehow Hawaiian state officials have been party to producing false official records. The Wall Street Journal's James Taranto has done some good work in working through this idiocy. Several readers have written over the past few days taking us to task for dismissing so-called birthers as lunatics without bothering to refute their claims. We reluctantly concede their point. The birthers have managed to sow confusion in the minds of some who are not lunatics, and for the latter group’s benefit it is worth clarifying matters. He follows up with another piece that deals with legal and constitutional misunderstandings and myths that have clustered around this issue. And what would such a conspiracy theory be without a faked birth certificate, "proving" that Mr Obama was born overseas? Sure enough, a "Kenyan" birth certificate purporting to show him being born in that country has magically appeared. It is a fake of course. Even better, it appears to be based upon an Australian birth certificate issued in 1964.   - The design is identical, down to the seal at the top and the classifications (”Christian name,” etc) used for identifying the baby. - The “registrar” on the Bomford document is G.F. Lavender. On the Taitz document, it’s E.F. Lavender. - The “district registrar” on the Bomford document is J.H. Miller. On the Taitz document, it’s M.H. Miller. - The number of the book is identical on both documents: Book 44B, Page 5733. What’s more likely — that two Kenyan bureaucrats shared last names with two Australian bureaucrats, and that the numbers on both certificates were identical? Or that someone used this document, available online for anyone who wanted to look, to forge the Obama “certificate?”

Posted via email from Garth's posterous