Atlanta Attorney Loren Collins, an outspoken critic of the birther movement, has published a sweeping historical research article tracing the origins of the central theme of the birther story: Obama was born overseas. It’s the kind of precise, clearly-articulated, well-reasoned and well-researched work that we’ve come to expect from Loren.
Read the story at Barackryphal:
Same as a 5 year old saying I know you are but what am I. Obamaba is just a big fat CIA lie. With a token Nobel Peace of shit Prize on the edge of starting WWIII. He like a _____ with a badge. Someone gonna take care of him one day, maybe Gaddafi. NWO sucks and everybody did not even see it coming.
Who is Obamaba? Are you five?
I’m not so crazy about the Old World Order. Maybe a New one could do better? Why not?
I knew birthers, when pushed to choose, would side with Gaddafi over the President of the United States.
“Thus, before it was a rumor that gave birth to a fringe movement and dozens of attempted lawsuits, Birtherism was borne out of nothing more than a legal hypothetical. No family confessions, no stories out of Africa, no investigative reporting. Just a mere thought exercise about citizenship law.”
Not surprising as an origin for the pathetic, bigotry driven, delusional motives behind birferdom.
I’m glad to see that patriotism is alive and well in the US of A. (/sarcasm)
I can’t tell if this is satire or not.
I took it as satire.
How else will they obtain the plutonium necessary to go back to 1955?
This seems like the appropriate place for this. A question for y’all.
Reading this allowed me to finally pinpoint something I’d been trying to remember: what was the first thing I’d seen about Obama’s birth certificate, and when was it. I remember reading some short thing in a mainstream-ish source, I mean not some very obscure blog or something, about rumors about Obama. That the main one was about his middle name being “Mohammed” rather than “Hussein.” (I remembered it because it struck me as unusually silly: if you were going to use a fake middle name so as to be more reassuring to American voters, and since it was fake you could use anything you wanted, is “Hussein” really your best choice?) But also, that there was a passing mention of rumors about his birthplace. The person was suggesting that Obama should release his birth certificate to dispel the rumors.
That had to have been that NRO post by Jim Geraghty.
I have to admit something. I thought that sounded like a pretty reasonable, smart thing to do. Just release it so everyone can see there’s no truth to the rumors. Then, when it was released, I thought it looked perfectly normal and I expected that would be the end of it. I’ve rarely been so totally and completely wrong about something.
So what I’m wondering is: when did you hear about this stuff and what did you think? Were you smarter than me?
I first became aware of it with the discussions and the COLB release to DKos.
P.S. Since then I have become extremely grateful for the extensive and intensive course on Constitutional law and judicial procedures that has been presented in these blogs. Thank you, all.
I believe that I first encountered the birther mythology on the right-leaning PoliticalCrossfire.com forum where I was writing under the id “Botox”. PCF seems to have gone defunct since then.
I’m not sure quite what I believed. I remember that I did believe Hawaii registered out of state births and someone else pointed out to me that the law wasn’t passed until 1982.
For a while I believed the fake McCain birth certificate (until I got a half-way decent copy and zoomed in.)
I became aware of the issue as a result of the mini-media-firestorm during the campaign, about the time Obama was posting the short-form to his website. But I didn’t become actively involved in the discussion until the long-form was put out. Though I dallied a bit around the forgery issue, my main focus has been on US citizenship laws, and boy have I learned a lot in the past couple of months.
I think I heard something on some message board during the campaign, but I’d be lying if I said I remember a specific date. The entire story of Stanley Ann Dunham going to Kenya to have a baby never made the slightest sense to me, so I dismissed the whole thing out of hand. Perhaps it’s because I had known a lot of foreign students and post docs during my time in academia and even where both spouses were foreign all of them had their kids in the US while they were living here. The birthers never even bothered to put together a narrative that passed the laugh test.
i don’t even recall noticing the COLB release, since to me I regarded it as a given that Obama was born in Hawaii, as that was where his parents lived and where he lived until the age of 7. The Obama campaign never made anything much of the release either, it just sort of appearred on a website with no fanfare. The candidate never mentioned it himself that I recall.
I’ve often felt that most of those in the polls from 6 months ago who said they “weren’t sure” where Obama was born had actually never seen the COLB or were even aware of its release. It’s possible the big drop in those having doubts after the long form release had less to do with the actual form than with the fact that many had never seen any b.c. at all. I mean, anyone who’s gotten a b.c. for themselves or for a child in the last 20 years (which would be the majority of folks under 50) would know that computer-generated forms are the norm.
> I’ve often felt that most of those in the polls from 6 months ago who said they “weren’t sure” where Obama was born had actually never seen the COLB or were even aware of its release.
Of course. I don’t know where the chancellor of my country was born (except “somewhere in East Germany”). Most people don’t know where Shakira or Britney Spears or Tiger Woods were born. Doesn’t mean they doubt their (natural born) citizenship, no matter how much birthers would like to spin it that way.
I am pretty certain that Shakira was born in Colombia and is not a natural born citizen of the US. In fact, I don’t know that she is a US citizen at all, nor, when i watch her shake her booty, do I care. She is actually more quaified than Michele Bachmann.
> I am pretty certain that Shakira was born in Colombia and is not a natural born citizen of the US.
I wasn’t alluding she was. 🙂
The point is, even if you know she was born in Colombia, you probably don’t know which city. And most people (including me) probably only know “somewhere in South America”.
But birthers spin “I don’t know where in the US Obama was born” into “I don’t know where Obama was born” into “I have doubts about Obama’s birthplace”.
> She is actually more quaified than Michele Bachmann.
Agreed. Then again, coming from a country that doesn’t know the NBC prerequisite, I don’t have any problem with naturalized officials, including the highest office. But I respect that some people do, without calling them racists or wingnuts.
And that’s what I always tell the birthers, that I’m not debating with them on the grounds of political issues, but on a legal and logical basis alone. (In fact, I wouldn’t consider myself qualified to judge if Obama is a good, average or bad president, just like I don’t like birthers spewing crap about “socialist Europe” or “England taken over by Muslims”.)