Birther Movement: Fizzling Out?

For the past few weeks, the birther movement seemed to be gaining momentum, slithering off the pages of right wing blogs and publications into the mainstream media. The recent appearance of a birth certificate purporting that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya, courtesy of “Birther Queen” Orly Taitz, aided the transition. If you are not familiar with Orly Taitz, she is the lawyer handling Alan Keyes’ California lawsuit against the president , which alleges he is not a “natural born” United States citizen and consequently ineligible for the presidency.

Different factions exist among the birthers, but all believe Obama is not eligible to be president. The following are some of the claims:

• He was born in Africa and ineligible for the presidency;
• He was born in Hawaii but renounced his US citizenship when he moved to Indonesia with his mother and stepfather;
• He was born in Hawaii, but his father was not a US citizen so he is not eligible for the presidency; and
• Because his father was not a US citizen, Obama had dual citizenship at birth, making him ineligible for the presidency.

Obama Releases His Birth Certificate

 The rumors emerged during the election, prompting Obama’s campaign staff to release a copy of his Hawaiian birth certificate. This was not enough for the birthers. They criticized the online copy for not listing the name of the hospital or physician; for saying “Certification of Live Birth,” as opposed to “Birth Certificate”; for having the number redacted, which was done by the State of Hawaii; and for not having a raised seal, which was simply not visible in the photocopy. Organizations like factcheck.org went to see the certificate in person and confirmed that it had a raised seal. Another version was released without the number redacted. Still, the birthers keep screaming for the “long form.”

The Long Form

In an MSNBC interview in which Orly Taitz went ballistic and accused the journalists of lacking integrity and being Nazi “brown shirts” working for the Obama regime, she claimed that Hawaii had “two types of birth certificates–one proper birth certificate from hospital and another that came from a parent, in other words, a parent just could fill out a form and lie.” She claimed that the parent would take this birth certificate to the Health Department and it would become the official record of the child’s birth. Based on her comments, it sounds like Orly Taitz–and others who share her views–believe that the souvenier birth certificate you get from the hospital with the baby’s cute little footprints is the official one and the Health Department files any old thing people say.

They also talk a lot about the “long form” birth certificate, which they say has detailed information. If you lose that birth certificate, as many of us do, and request a copy of your birth certificate, you typically receive what President Obama has in his possession: a certified copy that functions for all purposes in the US, including obtaining a passport and driver’s license, as legitimate proof of US citizenship. The birther response to this is that President Obama’s mother Stanley was trying to circumvent immigration authorities and the related expense and filed the “phony” certificate and there never was a “long form.”

Additionial Proof of Obama’s Hawaiian Birth

In addition to this birth certificate, journalists have unearthed two birth announcements from Hawaii publications: one was published August 13 in the Honolulu advertiser and the other on August 14 in teh Hawaii Star Bulletin. Both are identical and appear in the same order in a list of births that day, suggesting they were placed by the Health Department, not the family.

The head of Hawaii’s health department, as well as Hawaii’s Republican governor Linda Lingle, say they have seen the original and it is genuine: “I, Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen. I have nothing further to add to this statement or my original statement issued in October 2008 over eight months ago….”

What is Natural Born, Anyway?

 Orly Taitz says even if this were the case, because Obama’s father was a Kenyan citizen, he cannot be considered “natural born.” There is no support for this statement. While Obama had dual citizenship because of the British Nationality Act of 1948, which covered his father’s citizenship, this expired on August 4, 1982, because he never forfeited his US citizenship or pledged allegiance to Kenya.

The definition of “natural born” is not spelled out in the Constitution and has been a matter of debate for some time. Most constitutional experts agree, however, that natural born includes those children born on US soil–even if their parents are not US citizens. What does Article II of the Constitution actually say about who can be president?

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.

If one interprets this strictly as written, which conservatives say they like to do with the Constitution, then nobody can be president, as comic writer Chris Kelly points out in his amusing essay, “The Constitution Says Obama Can’t Be President. And Neither Could Reagan.” First, it does not restrict the presidency to a natural born citizen; it says “a natural born citizen OR a citizen of the United States.” Second, it says someone who was natural born “at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.” Does this mean someone who was a citizen in one of the original 13 states that existed in 1788 when the Constitution was adopted? Or does it mean, as suggested by punctuation, someone born in the United States and alive in 1788 when the Constitution was adopted?

So much for literal interpretations of the Constitution to determine Obama’s eligibility.

Calling Obama’s Step-Grandmother

 The other argument the birthers make is that Obama’s step-grandmother Sarah claimed in an interview she  was present when Obama was born–in Mombasa. There are all sorts of problems with this, including the fact that a complete transcription of the phone interview (not the abbreviated one filed in court) shows that when it became clear the caller (a rightwing street preacher from Philadelphia) mistakenly thought Sarah meant Obama was born in Mombasa and she was present at his birth, her family emphatically corrected him. It should be noted that the call was a deceit itself, with the caller pretending he was an Obama supporter honored to speak with his family. In reality, he hoped to trick the 85-year-old woman into saying Obama was born outside the US. The conversation was difficult to hear, with a lot of phone static. The caller was recording it, without informing the Obamas, and listening on speaker phone, and the entire conversation was translated from English into Swahili. Apparently Sarah Obama’s native tongue is Luo, and she only speaks Swahili a little. In fact, her nephew who is translating explains to the caller that they translate her Swahili Bible to Luo for her when they read it so she can understand it.

The person arranging the call swore in a deposition that Sarah Obama said Obama was born in Mombasa and she witnessed the birth, but he had a financial arrangement with the caller and he also asserted in his deposition the opinion that her family refuted her because they’d been coached. He never claims that Sarah Obama told him this information prior to the phone call, despite claiming to have had long conversations with her earlier.  Sarah Obama has never attested to any of this in a sworn deposition, as some Birthers have claimed.

This site does a great job of collecting all the information: http://www.obamaconspiracy.org/category/birth-certificate/ and is worth visiting.

Would a Pregnant Woman Go to Kenya?

It’s also worth noting that is Stanley Ann Obama went to Kenya as alleged in the summer of 1961 to give birth to Obama, she would have been going at a time when malaria, yellow fever, and smallpox were endemic. She would not have been able to be vaccinated, because it was already known that the vaccines were harmful to pregnant women. Cholera and tuberculosis were also rampant. There is a good chance she and the infant would have been subject to quarantine when returning to Hawaii, which required a vaccination certification from returning travelers from Africa.

The Kenyan Forgery

That Kenyan birth certificate? So many things were suspect and many suggested it was a fraud from the outset; Kenya was called Dominion of Kenya, not the Republic, at the time it was issued; the signatory “EF Lavender” was a common laundry soap; the age of Obama’s father was listed incorrectly; Mombasa was in what was then Zanzibar, not in Kenya at the time of Obama’s birth; and the names of different regions and even the hospital were incorrect. Even the currency denominations were wrong. It turns out that the certificate used an online certificate posted by an Australian man, David Bomford, on a genealogy site. Bomford’s certificate was signed by “GF Lavender.” Much of the other information was identical.

After first claiming to have obtained other copies of Kenyan birth certificates for comparison and finding them nearly identical the Birther-pushing site World Net Daily has backed off this claim.

Then:  WND was able to obtain other birth certificates from Kenya for purposes of comparison, and the form of the documents appear to be identical

Now: an authentic 1961-era Kenyan birth certificate obtained by WND shows distinct differences.

Were they just confused before? Perhaps their eyes had just been dilated?

Isn’t Obama a Citizen Regardless of Where He Was born Because His Mom Was One?

A lot of people question why any of this matters. If Obama’s mother was American doesn’t that make him American, too, no matter where he was born? The Birthers have an answer to this, too, and it’s, “NO!” The law at the time required the US parent to have lived in the United States for at least 5 years after the age of 14 and prior to the child’s birth; because Stanley Ann was 18 when Obama was born, she did not meet that 5-year benchmark. It has since been changed, and what the courts would decide is anybody’s guess.

Verdict: A Bunch of Bunk

Or, Orly Taitz is a Fraud

Now that we have all the debunking out of the way, let’s get to some analysis. There are some people who truly are convinced that Obama is not a US citizen; polls show they are mostly white Republicans living in the South. There are others who likely do not believe it but are encouraging it because they believe it will help them topple Obama in 2012. These include Congressional republicans who are pushing legislation to force presidential candidates to show their “original” birth certificates. Note that many signatories to this legislation recently voted for a resolution commemorating Hawaii’s 50th anniversary of joining the union, which stated that it was home to the 44th president, Barack Hussein Obama.

Where is Orly Taitz’s birth certificate? Is she a US citizen? She was raised in Moldova Russia, moved to Israel, then moved to the United States, where she got her law degree by taking correspondence courses from the unaccredited Howard Taft University. This entitles her to practice law only in Calfornia, because it is not recognized by the American Bar Association. Many of her filings have been thrown out because they do not comply with legal conventions. Her site, which I will not link to because it is considered a Malware site by Google, solicits donations. Could this merely be a fundraising scam for Orly Taitz? One has to wonder.

When Taitz debuted the Kenyan Certificate on her Website, she provided a photograph of the certificate against a red cloth with a particular pattern. This cloth shows up in a series of photographs posted by an “anonymous” blogger who claims to have made the forged Kenyan birth certificate. Whether he made it or not is irrelevant. What is worth noting is that Orly appears never to have had the actual document in her hands and was relying only on this photograph. Her court filing did not include a photocopy of the document or a scan; it included only a copy of this digital image. She also never submitted it for authentication, as others on the case insisted she do. I posit that Orly Taitz never had a copy of the fake certificate. She insists it is not a forgery despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Show Me the Stupid

Why is there a segment of the US population unwilling to believe the veracity of a document produced by an official government institution in Hawaii and attested to in court by US government officials–a document for which there is supporting concrete evidence with no evidence to the contrary? Yet this same crowd eagerly embraces a document of unknown provenance, attested to by no one other than a crazy Russian woman who may or may not be a US citizen, that is full of obvious historical inaccuracies and has since been proven to be false? Despite being found to be false, the Birthers insist it is genuine.

There is only one explanation for their attitude: willful ignorance. They do not want to believe a black man with a foreign sounding name could be their legal president. Many of the images these same people produce or comments they make online evince a deep-seated racism. The conservative media is highly culpable, particulary Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, with their inflammatory rhetoric, racism, and Nazi comparisons. It is clear nothing will convince these people; they are not looking for facts that will help them decide one way or the other. They are only willing to accept as evidence only those things that confirm their preconceived beliefs.

The Kenyan forgery has forced many Republicans and conservatives to go on record denying the Birther movement or risk being branded loons for life, and that has certainly deflated the movement temporarily. Still, it continues to simmer in the background and no doubt will continue to crop up again and again as long as Obama is president.

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