Montgomery Blair Sibley is not too happy with a definition of “birther” from 2008 from the Urban Dictionary cited in his article from Thursday, “BuzzFeed, Birthers & Me”:
The term “birther” now has a common understanding in the general lexicon: “Birther: A conspiracy theorist who believes that Barack Obama is ineligible for the Presidency of the United States, based on any number of claims related to his place of birth, birth certificate, favorite birthday, or whether or not he has heard the song Africa by Toto."
He says that birthers are, oh, so much more–that they raise important legal issues too. Quoted by BuzzFeed News in their article “Ted Cruz Inherits Obama’s Birthers” January 15, Sibley says:
“It doesn’t matter that he was born in Canada,” Sibley continued, “he would be ineligible to be president if was born on the Washington Monument, as long as he only had one parent who was a citizen.”
I think “born on the Washington Monument” qualifies as a “difficult birth.” Sibley perhaps was not cognizant of the minor question of the eligibility for persons born in the District of Columbia, which is not a state–I guess that was pretty much resolved when Al Gore became vice president.
This quote highlights the angst of the Obama birthers because all of the new legal writing on Ted Cruz eligibility assumes that Obama is unarguably eligible, having been born in the country, limiting the valid legal dispute to the eligibility of the foreign born, not where Sibley and his kin want to draw the line. Obama birthers have touted ineligibility arguments against Ted Cruz, but those arguments are problematic for them, as one Birther Report commenter so ably put it:
once again.. much of the Birther Report crowd was "played" and made into "useful idiots" by those who (1) maintain that Obama is a NBC, (2) and who have to throw out vattal and Minor v. Happersett, pretending they don’t exist, and (3) have to pretend that the founding fathers originally put more weight on place of birth than they did on citizenship of the parents–in fact, Ark was probably wrongly decided and by going back to British common law, Ark obliterated a desire by the founding fathers that citizens were more then serfs bound to the land of their birth, but has superior rights at birth. But, again, Mary Brigid McManamon doesn’t understand this… and you’re all being "played" and made into "useful idiots" when you cheer for Trump’s posts that espouse these things.
— pvsys
— Comment at Birther Report
I think it qualifies as something I’d pay to see…
I’m always amused when birthers refer to “Ark” instead of “Wong” (the defendant’s family name). They can’t even get the small details correct.
Well, if he wuz a real Murrican, he wouldna writ his name backwards 😉
I’m mixing that up myself a lot, too. Mostly because some Asians (at least here in Germany) tend to write their name the Western way (“Kim Ark Wong”) and some don’t (“Wong Kim Ark”), so unless you’re very familiar with the names themselves, it’s impossible to tell apart.
I remember when I was a tutor at university and had a guy in my class where it also wasn’t clear what was the last name (he had signed up as “Amiti Abib”). So I said “Is ‘Amiti’ the last name or ‘Abib’?” and he indignantly replied “Amiti of course. No first name ends in an ‘i’.” as if I were supposed to know that. (He was from Albania.)
If you were to write a blog saying he wasn’t a natural born citizen and his real name was Kra Mik Gnow, it wouldn’t be long before some birther somewhere started spreading that one around.