August 14, 2009

You Might Be a Birther if...

By Kyle-Anne Shiver

Please call me skeptical. It's a label I proudly wear. Since my first day of second grade, when I traded my homemade chocolate-chip cookies for a smooth-talking fourth-grader's out-of-ink ballpoint pen, I've been a wary consumer.

So, if a presidential candidate tries to hand me a barebones certificate of live birth in lieu of a valid, long-form birth certificate, my skeptical antennae go on alert. I automatically question his motives and whether or not he may be trying to play a little fast and loose with the U.S. Constitution. When that same president purportedly spends over a million dollars on legal fees, merely to keep a simple document sealed, then I'm starting to become curiouser and curiouser.

All in all, though, I might be able to get past the whole long-form birth certificate issue if this president had released the whole host of other life documentation, generally required for high-level job applications.

To whit, what is in the following documents that might diminish the Obama "narrative," as sold to the public by marketing guru, David Axelrod, and a strangely incurious media?

Panahou Academy school records, 5th through 12th grades
Occidental College records, including financial aid information.
Columbia University records, including the missing senior thesis and financial aid information.
Harvard University records, including information on how a student who never wrote anything (that can be found) was elected president of the prestigious law review, and including information on how Harvard Law School was afforded by humble community agitator, Barack Obama.
Obama's Illinois state senate records and papers, mysteriously lost.

No man or woman in this Country today could successfully apply for a high-level executive position with any corporation without submitting this meager documentation to prove the statements made in a job application. No president in the past 30 years has been permitted this level of secrecy about his life. Yet, today we have a sitting president who has provided none of it. In lieu of actual documents, the American public has a "narrative" created by PR guru, turned political operative, David Axelrod.

It is this veritable information vacuum that feeds the birth certificate inquiries.

This ain't rocket science. It ain't even first-year-law-school tough.

If there is a simple legal issue at stake, and the defendant has the incontrovertible proof that would settle the issue, then all the plaintiff need do is produce the proof in court or in public. Case closed. Issue settled.

Go back to sleep now, boys and girls.

Unfortunately, President Obama and his insolent, adolescent press secretary, Bobby Gibbs, have decided to play dodgeball with the birth-certificate issue. Rather than just - quite simply -- provide the detailed birth certificate, signed by the attending physician, issued by the hospital where the birth occurred, Bobby and Barry have chosen to mock those asking for the proof.

When asked in July why this issue continues to simmer and raise its ugly head again and again, Bobby Gibbs offered this, now quite-trite response: "For $15 anyone can buy an internet address and say anything they want," calling the whole birth certificate brouhaha "made-up, fictional nonsense."

Why those silly, silly Birthers. Thinking that a president might try to bamboozle the American public! Has anything ever seemed so foolish, so imbecilic, so deranged!

Let me see, now. Have I ever been bamboozled by an American president?

LBJ: "I will never send American boys to fight in Vietnam."

Richard Nixon: "I am not a crook."

Bill Clinton: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

So, with all my little heart and soul, I want to believe both Barry and Bobby, but I'm still wanting the actual proof. And contrary to all protestations to the contrary, the current president's valid, long-form birth certificate, with all the pertinent details of his birth and legal signatures, has not been released by the state of Hawaii because permission to release it has - as of this very minute - not been granted by Barack Hussein Obama.

For all of us common citizens, who well remember having been bamboozled by former presidents, I've compiled a short list of what it takes to make one a Birther. You might want to see if your own skepticism warrants your inclusion in this growing number of "conspiracy nuts."

You might be a Birther if...you believe that the U.S. Constitution is still relevant. Most lawyers I know are quite the sticklers for legalese and detail. There is a simple, plainly-worded clause in the U.S. Constitution regarding the qualifications for the office of the presidency.

Article 2; Section 1:

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.

A fourth-grader could understand this. Surely anyone, who wants to be president, and who is himself a lawyer, could read it and know what it means.

However, I'm inclined at this point, to question whether this president is a stickler for detail. Any lawyer, who goes on record surmising that police officers "acted stupidly," when he knows only scant details of an arrest incident, and openly admits that the person arrested is a personal friend, and that the details he knows came from his friend, is not like any lawyer I know. In fact, since Barack Obama assumed the presidency, he has shown over and over and over again an alarming disregard for the truth, especially in the details.

If you agree, then you might actually be a Birther.

You might be a Birther if...you ascribe to the rule of law. The law is the law. You can go through proper channels to change it, but if you respect the rule of law, you accept it, abide by it and until it is legally changed, you do not attempt to dodge it. The president is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States of America. When a president - any president - abridges the Constitution, even in the minutest of ways, it is a most egregious matter.

Our founders were quite intellectual men of reason, and possessed of uncommon foresight. They recognized that they were forming an imperfect union and knew that changes would be necessary with the passage of time. To this end, they established a formal process for amending our Constitution to meet the needs of a changing America. The process is necessarily cumbersome and difficult, requiring a great deal of public support.

Many now believe that the "natural-born citizen" clause is outdated and meaningless. Fine. All these folks need do is begin the process of passing a formal Constitutional Amendment, which would change the rule of law by which we choose our presidents. Until then, the rule of law is as stated in Article 2, Section 1.

You might actually be a Birther if you believe in the rule of law.

You might be a Birther if...you now have a feeling in your gut that the narrative used to elect a president was a bit off the mark in substantive ways. You may have been a moderate, who bought candidate Obama's conciliatory voice of moderation and intelligence, as eloquently displayed again and again on the campaign trail. But now that you've witnessed one leftist power play after another coming from the President, you're thinking you may have been misled. At the very least, you may be a Birther if you simply would like the president, who promised you transparency, to actually deliver a modicum of the stuff.

As for me, I'm no wacko. Nor am I believing much of anything this president says now, because he's been caught in so many exaggerations, so many outright lies, so many contortions of the truth, that anyone still trusting him on even small matters, might lack a decent amount of common sense.

The American system of government was designed upon an open acknowledgement of the unsavory elements of human nature. Our system is designed to be skeptical and demand proof.

To those who now calculate the political ramifications of making this simple request for records, I'm prone to ask myself when good old American civics died. There is nothing whatsoever political involved in this, except what the President, his own press secretary and leftist media hounds have made of it themselves. Have we all become nothing higher on the citizen scale than political operatives, gauging our words in accord with what effect they may have upon an electoral contest in the future? If so, we may be accomplices in the murder of American civics, plain and simple.

At this juncture, every single American of every political stripe might want to claim the title, "Birther." It is, after all, as American as apple pie to simply and politely say, "Show me."

Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and a newly syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate. She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver.com.

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