Obama Conspiracy Theories has put up the sand bags in preparation for the flood of nuttiness that should shortly crest after the release of Jerome Corsi’s soon-to-be comedy classic, Where’s the Birth Certificate?
Tomorrow (May 17) is the date of its long-anticipated release (anticipated at least until Barack Obama answered the question on national TV, making Corsi’s book one of the great anticlimaxes of all time).
The book’s ranking on Amazon.com plummeted from a pre-sales high of #1 down to #178, but has recovered infinitesimally to #162 as its actual release date appears on the horizon.
I do not look forward to the clean up in the aftermath of this man-made disaster.
in related news the official Birferstan Census has been released, it shows that all 6 citzens are white except for the 2 Caucasians..
[begin birther mode]
“Caucasian” is not a race, it’s a mountain range! The Birferstan Census is a forgery!! Waaaahhh!!!
[end birther mode]
I think the book will again gain traction and get better numbers for it will be talked about on blogs, forums and it will be done by word of mouth.
“soon-to-be comedy classic, ”
Could gain traction if advertised on “The Onion” as “based on a true story”.
as for “word of mouth”, only fools rush in.
Or it could gain traction if it’s used under tires in a mudslide.
Farah is getting these fright wing, decrepit, bigoted fools’ Social Security and pension checks and laughing both sides of his face off.
Stormfront will probably make it their book of the month.
That means “traction” only among those who already have their minds made up about Obama’s natural born citizen status. Corsi will be “preaching to the choir.”
If the book were to sell a million copies (which it won’t), that would be equivalent to only 1.4% of the number of votes Obama received in 2008. (69,456,897 popular votes, the most popular votes for any presidential candidate in American history).
I wonder what the Donald will have to say about the book. Corsi and Farah really played him with their behind-the-scenes coaching on how to be a birther.
Yeah, it will have traction within the same closed-off birther hidey-hole websites that do nothing but flog every delusional debunked birther myth anyways.
Back in the real world – bargain bin material gaining dust in a matter of weeks at most. If it gets any mainstream press in the short term, it will most likely be pointed mocking at its utter craziness and bad timing.
In other words, it will be a punchline, not a bombshell. And then quickly fade into obscurity.
Yes it’ll gain traction if there was suddenly a supply shortage of toilet paper in the world.
I doubt Trump will want to comment on it at all.
His sudden announcement today that he’s completely OUT and NOT RUNNING is very telling. He didn’t even wait until his big live show finale this 5/22 as he had promised to deliver the news. Mr. Publicity hound didn’t even make the statement in person. He simply submitted a written statement bowing out to the media.
To me, that says he wants to get as far away from this whole debacle and the stink it left all over him and his brand as quickly as possible.
I saw where Corsi’s earlier book, The Obama Nation, was #1 on the charts after having sold 21,466 copies.
http://www.amazon.com/Obama-Nation-Sales-Negative-Reviews/forum/FxAR824MNOI1RZ/Tx71B1YTSCWU1P/1?_encoding=UTF8&asin=0385525869
“And now briskly flying off the shelves at the Hell Plaza Waldenbooks….”
Corsi is due to be on Sean Hannity’s Radio show tommorrow and then on his Fox TV show promoting the book
In related news, a crazy man wearing a sandwich board that reads “THE WORLD IS ENDING IN 2012” is standing on a street corner outside of the car wash.
What would be real theater would be for him to appear on Anderson Cooper 360° on CNN.
Yes it would. Anderson is not so smart.
Doc: I noted that you deleted my posts where I changed “Retiired intelligence Officer” to “Retired Stupidity Officer”. Here is the problem. This poster has deliberately chosen a title that conveys authority in order to post a bunch of pernicious lies (that is honestly what they are). When challenged to prove his credentials, he has evaded doing so.
I don’t feel it is right that someone should be allowed to post under cover of authority without establishing their bona fides. So, I would ask that you either require him to show that is he in fact an RTI or require him to choose another name. By the way, I am indeed a PhD molecular biologist and immunologist and would be happy to establish my bona fides off-line with you.
Sure it will….just like Orly will have Obama out of the White House in 30 days.
That is crazy, because we all know the world ends in less than a week, on May 21.
Sounds like someone is simply angry because Anderson has such a strong record of challenging Birthers on their stories and debunking Birther myths.
(Pretend) Retired Intelligence Officer,
I am working on a book to be published in the future titled:
“Why We Will Never Catch Bin Laden”. It will be filled with anti-Obama screeds. Would you like to purchase an advance deluxe copy now for only $49.95?
I’ll even stop asking that you post proof of your intelligence background claims…
If Corsi hasn’t done it yet, I’d love to see him on Jon Stewart. He’s one of the few people that would have the guts to expose Corsi for the complete fraud that he is. Of course, that assumes that Corsi would even have the guts to do it.
Corsi won’t go near Cooper or Stewart. He will appear on safe ground but that’s it.
Well, i tried to get a sneak peek at the book at work, but it was sealed up in a laydown box. 🙠I guess I’ll have to wait till tomorrow like everyone else. poo.
It’s down to #269 now
Now that sounds exactly like something Orly would say. People from the Caucasus were (and basically still are) called “blacks” in the Old Soviet Union – until they revealed they were Georgian, Armenian or Ossetian. Sometimes, even Mediterranean types from Moldavia, and Southern Ukraine were called balcks. but the usual name was Odessite.
Orly is an Odessite, but shares a lot of the historical psychology of Southern Russians. Their basic dislike of “blacks” and Africans is base on religion. Black is bad becuase it means Muslim. Now, as someone else would say, “that is interesting”, is it not?
> That is crazy, because we all know the world ends in less than a week, on May 21.
I suppose God will postpone that a little bit, after all he also wants to know if birthers are correct and Obama will be removed “any day now”. He wouldn’t want to miss (or spoil) all the fun of Obama being frog-marched out of the WH on May 22nd, would he?
(That was a joke, of course. Truth is, Soros already told me the end of the world has been postponed because our Alien Overlords had a problem with it coinciding with the Grzz’norg Superbowl and they’ve still not filled all the promotion slots.)
Expect a handful of birthers to actually buy the book. Then, after they post “facts” from it on blogs, watch the rest of them cite those “facts” as if they had read it.
Farah wants our help to get the Media to pay attention to this vital piece of work.
I say we help with this, if only so the news networks can go to town on it like they did Trump’s claims.
Farah wants to fool gullible birthers out of every dime. It’s his cash cow. The more they give to idiotic causes like this, the less they will contribute to the President’s opponents in the next election.
See from looking at the endnotes to Corsi’s book on Amazon that he cites Apuzzo’s blog and Doc’s blog’s post on The Law of Nations and the Law of the United States. There is expert opinion for you.
http://www.amazon.com/Wheres-Birth-Certificate-Eligible-President/dp/1936488299#reader_1936488299
Here is Doc’s article that is cited by Corsi.
http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2009/02/the-law-of-nations-and-the-law-of-the-united-states/
Not my best article on the topic.
No, Anderson would simply eviscerate him the way he has all the other birthers who’ve been stupid enough to go on his show.
Also, kindly provide proof that you are indeed a “retired intelligence office,” including your service jacket. All you have done to date is spout inaccuracies and outright falsehoods, so I’m a bit skeptical that you ever served, let alone in a responsible position in government.
Slow day. Went to Barnes and Nobles and thumbed through the book. I believe he cites Doc four times. He cites Doc’s article claiming McCain’s certificate was a forgery, I guess to try to say the liberals do the same thing as birthers. He cites Doc on Obama’s father saying he was of African race. He cites Doc on the Sun Yat-Sen nonsense. Finally, he cites Doc on natural law in a footnote I think trying to say that some Obots think natural law is not definitive enough to base legal interpretation on. He of course does not know that accordingly to Lord Coke, jus soli was natural law and that Lord Coke was much more influential on the founders than Vattel.
Just thumbed through the book, but I saw nothing new. If Farah is trying to argue that this is the book that makes the Vattel argument, such argument is pathetic. Corsi offers little, if any, support for the Vattel argument. He seems to claim that NBC is based upon natural law without citing any actual legal authority of the period to support such assertion. Of course, he quotes the translation of Vattel that didn’t exist in 1787. He claims the 14th Amendment says exactly the opposite of what the framers of such amendment actually said as no one in such Congress said one needed citizen parents. Perhaps, someone should send him the debates on such Amendment. Of course, he has no idea what Wong King Ark actually said. Someone needs a lesson in dicta, ratio decidendi and reading basic case law.
I’ve heard that Farah, who claims to be a Christian Arab, is actually a radical Muslim agent sent to foment revolution and dissent against the US Government.
Now you have heard it too. Where there is smoke, there is fire.
I got a sort-of review up at op ed news
http://www.opednews.com/Diary/Where-s-the-Birth-Certifi-by-J-Edward-Tremlett-110517-839.html
I didn’t review the whole of the book. I looked specifically on the issues of eligibility that WND et al are moving the goalposts towards, now that the Long Form is out. As you might well guess, and as Ballantine pointed out, the proof is not in the pudding.
Sorry this is so long, but here is my soon-to-be-published-on-Amazon review of Corsi’s book:
This book deserves five stars for staying true to the WorldNetDaily birther conspiracy theories, and zero for its virtually non-existent historical and legal analysis.
As is suggested by the title of the book, Jerome Corsi spends a good deal of time weaving a theory that casts doubt on the existence of President Obama’s “long-form” birth certificate. Given that Obama has now shown his long-form, and the state of Hawaii has once again confirmed its validity, I’ll let this turn of events speak for itself as to the credibility of Corsi’s reasoning on the long-form.
Corsi then turns to birther Plan B: even if Obama was born in Hawaii, he still cannot be a natural born citizen because he was also a British citizen at the time of his birth. Here Corsi conflates two distinct arguments as though they were one. On the one hand, he claims that only persons with two U.S. citizen parents at the time of birth can be natural born citizens. On the other, he asserts that persons with dual citizenship at birth cannot be natural born citizens. As it turns out, one CAN have two U.S. citizen parents at birth AND be dual citizen at the same time. For example, if a person is born in the UK, but later naturalizes as a U.S. citizen, he is still seen as a UK citizen in the eyes of the UK. Moreover, he can confer his UK citizenship to his children even if they are not born in the UK. Under the no-dual-citizenship theory, former presidents James Buchanan (father born in UK), Andrew Johnson (father likely born in UK) and Chester Arthur (father born in UK) would be illegitimate presidents. I think we can safely dispose of such a silly hypothesis, if for nothing else than it is highly doubtful that the Founding Fathers would have permitted foreign governments to determine through their own citizenship laws who could govern the United States.
How does Corsi support his two U.S. citizen parent thesis? As it turns out, by relying almost entirely on the fact that the Founding Fathers were very familiar with and respected Vattel’s treatise, Law of Nations. In Section 212 of the first book of Law of Nations, Vattel writes: “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” Vattel then makes it clear that he views such persons as the ONLY persons who are citizens at birth: “I say, that, in order to be of the country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is a citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only the place of his birth, and not his country.” In other words, for Vattel, natural born citizens and citizens by birth are one and the same. And birthright citizens in his eyes had to have two citizen parents.
The concept of “natural born subject” was centuries old in Britain by the late 18th century. A natural born subject was well understood under common law to mean anyone who was born in the country whose parents were not foreign diplomats or nationals of a hostile occupying power. As the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) observed, the Founding Fathers were well acquainted with common law principles. Indeed, the Court observed that the U.S. Constitution “must be interpreted in the light of the common law, the principles and history of which were familiarly known to the framers of the Constitution.”
So which is it? Did the Founding Fathers base the meaning of “natural born Citizen” off of Vattel, as Corsi says, or common law, as the Supreme Court says? Here’s where we must do the research that Corsi conveniently (or negligently, if we are to give him the benefit of the doubt) omits. As it turns out, the Founding Fathers did not even invent the term “natural born citizen.” By 1786, the Massachusetts legislature was already using the term “natural born citizen” as a semantic adaptation of natural born subject. But how did the Founding Fathers understand this pre-existing phrase? What were THEIR views on allegiance? Did they agree with Vattel? As it turns out, no one less than James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, gives us an answer – less than two years after the Constitutional Convention. In March 1789, Madison stated: “It is an established maxim, that birth is a criterion of allegiance. Birth, however, derives its force sometimes from place, and sometimes from parentage; but, in general place is the most certain criterion; it is what applies in the United States.” Madison was clear that he saw little substantive distinction between “subject” and “citizen” for purposes of allegiance: “In order to make a citizen or subject, it is established, that allegiance shall first be due to the whole nation.” Again, Madison speaks of allegiance in terms of local community, and not parentage: “I conceive that every person who owed this primary allegiance to the particular community where he was born, retained his right of birth, as a member of a new community [the United States].”
Throughout the years, courts have had little difficulty interpreting natural born citizen as meaning, at minimum, all persons who became citizens at birth by being born in the United States. In 1844, the New York Court of Chancery, in Lynch v. Clarke, noted: “The only standard which then existed [in 1787], of a natural born citizen, was the rule of the common law, and no different standard has been adopted since.” The court then made an observation which seems very prescient today: “Suppose a person should be elected president who was native born, but of alien parents, could there be any reasonable doubt that he was eligible under the Constitution? I think not.”
Corsi and other birthers posit that natural born citizens are a subset of born citizens, and that born citizens who are not natural born are merely “naturalized.” Neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor any other court in American history has ever recognized Corsi’s novel distinctions. In Minor v. Happersett (1875), the U.S. Supreme Court noted that “new [U.S.] citizens may be born or they may be created by naturalization.” In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court in Schneider v. Rusk, viewing “native born” and “natural born” as the same thing, wrote: “We start from the premise that the rights of citizenship of the native born and of the naturalized person are of the same dignity, and are coextensive. The only difference drawn by the Constitution is that only the “natural born” citizen is eligible to be President.”
Corsi feebly attempts to dodge this avalanche of historical precedent by dismissing Wong Kim Ark as not relevant because it was concerned only with whether a person born of alien parents in the U.S. is a U.S. citizen by birth – and not whether he is a natural born citizen. Corsi is correct that the court was directly concerned with citizenship and not presidential eligibility – but of course Wong Kim Ark wasn’t seeking to become president. Nonetheless, the question of whether Wong Kim Ark was “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States at birth for purposes of the 14th Amendment was intimately connected to the same issues of allegiance that form the backbone of the natural born citizen clause. Although Corsi casually dismisses it, the Court provided pages and pages of evidence that U.S. concepts of allegiance were direct descendants of common law – exactly the opposite of Corsi’s thesis.
Jerome Corsi certainly knows how to distill the latest right-wing outrage de jour, and he couches his argument in the language of a self-proclaimed patriot. Good for him. He’s wealthy and gets plenty of airtime on TV. But his latest work shows he is not an historian, a constitutional lawyer or even a competent investigator. I wouldn’t recommend this book for a serious analysis of the presidential eligibility “issue,” but it will be a useful historical artifact documenting the fantasy that is birtherism.
John C: I enjoyed your review; You’ve convinced me not to buy it. One thing . . . you write, “In other words, for Vattel, natural born citizens and citizens by birth are one and the same. And birthright citizens in his eyes had to have two citizen parents.” From what I understand from French-speaking participants on this site, in the original French, Vattel does not argue for a two citizen parents model; rather, that idea is the result of an imprecise translation of Vattel’s work into English. Bovril, Paul P. — do I have this right? If so, please add more complete information as you like.
> From what I understand from French-speaking participants on this site, in the original French, Vattel does not argue for a two citizen parents model; rather, that idea is the result of an imprecise translation of Vattel’s work into English.
Yes, it has been argued by native French speakers here that “de parens citoyens” is plural because the word it refers to is plural (just like “this club is open to children of members” typically does not mean both parents must be members or “this event is open to legal owners of tickets” does not mean you have to own two or more tickets to enter).
So in a way, it’s not an imprecise translation per se, it’s rather a precise translation of an imprecise sentence, as I understood it.
My reading of Vattel’s original French language version, from what little I know of French, appears to be vague in that language as well. For example, “parents citoyens” translates to “citizen parents,” which appears to be vague in both languages as to whether that means “mutliple people, each with a least one citizen parent” or “multiple citizen parents per person.”
FYI – my Amazon review is up. (To help you find it, it is one of the small handfull of two-star reviews.)
Let me know if I missed anything.
While preparing for the flood, the CDC is now recommending how to prepare for the zombies.
http://emergency.cdc.gov/socialmedia/zombies_blog.asp
Here’s the link to my review of Corsi’s book:
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1UK9RF01E55WH/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1936488299&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=
The only thing wrong is that you gave it one star too many, but sadly Amazon doesn’t allow people give negative ratings.
Dorogu dlinnuyu (= those were the days). The comments there look rather funny in the light of what we know since then. We actually allowed a birther to write that Thomas Jefferson claimed no dual citizen could be a natural born citizen.
The only one ever found actually presidenting while a dual citizen. (Spiro Agnew was only VP, so that does not count)
In Vattel’s time, the French word “parent” did not normally mean father or mother, but any family member (usually, but not always, older – an aunt or uncle was always a parent – in-laws were not). The use of the word “parens” in the meaning “father and mother” was actually condemned as very vulgar French by the famous French linguist Dominique Bouhours. Note that when Vattel uses “parens” elsewhere in the Law of Nations, it is always with the “polite” meaning of genetic relatives.
And yes, the plural is indeed necessary there according to French grammar, and a legal text in French would nomally use additional words to clarify a real plural is intended. Meaning one uncle or aunt who is a citizen would be enough to give an “anchor” to the child born in the land..
It would be funny if Dominique Bouhours were ever mentioned in a US court case on NBC, but Bobby Jindal would not like that, probably. And in case Orly or MichaelN are reading this, though I have lived in Moscow (hahaha), my internet provider was never located at Dom 2 in Smolenskaya-Sennaya Square, 27.
Arthur,
The whole “two parent” VAttel is utter BS and taken wholly out of context as……ding ding ding..later in the same treatise he says that this idea is only relevant to SOME countries as in others SUCH AS ENGLAND, Jus Soli is good to go.
Typical Birfoon lies and selective editing that then becomes a “fact” repeated in the squalid little echo chambers of Birferstan
Since no conspiracy blog is a real conspiracy blog nowadays, without refernces to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a comment by a Frenchman on the fact that DSK’s daughter is prepared to testify that her father looked very relaxed at 13 hours that day
“Le témoignage à décharge d’un parent est-il valable ?”
(Le 20/05/2011 Ã 10:13)
http://plus.lefigaro.fr/article/camille-strauss-kahn-le-temoin-cle-20110519-465262/commentaires?page=4
(meaning “is the testimony of a “relative” valid [in the USA])
So, Vattel’s usage is still quite normal in the French language today. Even, contrary to what I thought, for relatives younger than you.
Donc, moi, j’ai des parents en Australie..