The premise here is that some, if not most, birthers are yanking Obama’s chain, and know it (I imagine them holding meetings where they grin and tell each other, " Aren’t we such devils?"). IOW, they’re in it to give the President a hard time, they know they’re hellbent on rejecting any so-called evidence he might provide and keeping a seed of doubt planted in the minds of ignorant voters for partisan or electoral advantage, and don’t actually believe the Kenyan/Hawaiian/Indonesian/Harvard/Columbia/Martian nonsense for a second–but has anyone fessed up yet? By fessed up, I mean, something like “OK, I pretended to be a birther to keep the troops’ morale high, but this got a little silly and a little scary.” If so, who’s the most publicly known birther to have done so? Have any Hillaryites who tried the birth card gambit, for example, spoken about their role in creating this myth?
I don’t think anyone is going to 'fess up. The birth certificate “issue” is a pefect one for sleazy politicians. They can suggest that Obama is not a citizen, then back away from the statement in some way, but never state that he IS a citizen.
Wikipedia has a list of politicians who have made some sort of birther statement. Notice how many of them used the out of context excuse. The whole thing is just so sleazy and cynical that most of the politicians who have dabbled with it have tried to deny that they have in some way.
Since this is basically a question about politics, and it’s going to be impossible to keep political commentary out of it, I think it is best suited to GD rather than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I’m not a “birther,” nor have I ever been by any means.
HOWEVER, I always thought Hawaii was being at best silly and at worst cagey about releasing his birth certificate. I mean, I get strict privacy laws and all, but this was (or at least, was being made out to be) a Constitutional matter.
Furthermore, I was never really with Obama on the whole “principle of it all” thing. I mean, yes, there was never any doubt in my mind that he was born in the US. So what did he have to gain by holding onto his certificate for this long, and what would he have had to lose by showing it when the matter first came up?
If anyone wants to see my Illinois birth certificate, I will gladly show it to you. I think it’s around here somewhere…
Because it would have been bad precedent and a violation of his privacy if they’d done it without his consent.
And here we go again. This entire issue began in 2008 when Obama posted a copy of his birth certificate on his web site. So he did show it at the beginning, and without being asked. The rumors about him being born in Kenya started after that. Getting another document would not have changed anything then and it hasn’t changed anything now.
Really? Are you sure you don’t simply have a certified copy, like the one Obama provided years ago?
So, Obama provided a certified copy of an Illinois birth certificate and a Hawaiian one? My God, he’s a bi-locating, socialist, atheist Muslim!
Donald Trump still has to review and approve it.
The way the birthers act and talk is a classic example of the “conspiracy theorist” mindset; I doubt that most of them are faking. They are True Believers, and quite delusional.
Why would they? Releasing the new document didn’t make Obama turn white, so it didn’t address the root cause of their aggravation.
Don’t forget, his " mother’s " name is Stanley… food for thought.
His mom’s name is also Stanley, which raises serious questions about her gender.
ETA: Damn, Cheesesteak beat me to it.
The hardcore birthers will never give up. They will simply claim it’s a forgery.
Any cite that there ever were any Hillaryites who had any role in it? So far as I know, the so-called “pumas” were just Republicans who were trying to sabotage the Democratic nomination process, not actually supporters of Clinton.
He posted a recently-generated abstract of the record. Someone somewhat inclined to think there was a conspiracy to sneak an adult, non-citizen up and coming Obama into office could imagine a scenario in which around 2008 the abstract was faked up. Producing a document that everyone seems to agree was generated in 1961 would require an order of magnitude greater tolerance for far-out CT because the only birther fallback positions now have to be (a) that record wasn’t really from 1961, it was faked too; or (b) someone had the foresight to fake it in 1961 to position the child of impecunious young students to take power for sinister purposes 50 years down the road. Both of those are significantly harder to swallow than “without the original certificate, we just can’t be sure, why do we have to settle for a laser print out “abstract” from 2008?”
So yeah, I think he could have quelled much of it had he chosen to do this earlier. There’s an irreducible set of crazy people not ashamed to be seen as crazy, that’s always true, but candidates have waived privacy in exchange for power on equally or more private issues. It was his choice under the law to do it or not to do it, so I don’t really care, but it did seem he caused himself a good bit of unnecessary ruckus.
How ? He released a legal birth certificate a long time ago. It will get you a passport and is accepted as proof in courts and business transactions. He did what he was supposed to do.
The righties should have stopped right there instead of cooking up a conspiracy.
I guess this is a whole nother question, which we could look to the spring of 2008 to check out, but I seem to recall that some bonafide Hililaryites were on this bandwagon for a while…I could be wrong about this, but I don’t remember having it demonstrated to my satisfaction.
I don’t have a cite, but these questions arose during the Democrat primaries when most of the money was still on Hillary. I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to if this was started by the Clinton campaign.
And doesn’t anyone care that Obama is a citizen because his mother was a citizen, not because of where he was born?
IIRC, Hillary kept the evil Muslim rumor going, not the birther rumor.
AFAIK.
Actual birthers, yes. But the politicians seem to more be fakers. Even McCain got in on it, I think, after previously stating he was sure Obama was a U.S. citizen.
And this is getting annoying: I just had to smack someone down for posting crap about Obama on a Star Trek website. He was blaming Obama for the TSA.