Donald Trump: Natural Born Birther/Part Two

The Birthers have a particular personality type, some liberals have it too, that is very eager and willing to believe anything bad about the other side. As a matter of fact, the more preposterously evil, the stronger their belief.
"Bill Clinton killed Vince Foster," "Obama wants to destroy America," "he is the Anti Christ," "the Dems are trying to create Death Panels so that they can euthanize Republicans and old people."
This is the one that gets me the most about liberals; "George Bush approved a plot by the U.S. government to take down the Twin Towers in order to blame it on Saddam Hussein and justify the invasion of Iraq."
For crying out loud.

Occasionally, I'll get emails that circulate the internet, from conservative friends or family members, that make all sorts of allegations against liberals. Many are absurd on their face, others seem like they might be plausible. Every time I've fact checked them they turn out to be flat out wrong.
Like one that I got from my sister-in-law that said that there were more troop deaths under Clinton than there were under Bush's post Iraq invasion years. This one actually came with a citation from a U.S. Government web site, which made me think that it might be correct, but I went through the trouble of checking it out and it was totally false. The email got the numbers completely wrong. I informed my sis-in-law about this "mistake" and told her that I was certain that she would send out a correction to all of the people who she sent the email to, because she wouldn't want anyone to be operating with false information. She said "thanks" but nothing about sending out a correction.

Then there was this one about Jane Fonda stabbing our POW boys in the back;

"This was sent to me by a Vietnam vet. Have you heard the story about Jane Fonda handing the pieces of paper to the prison commander?

'She took them all without missing a beat.. At the
End of the line and once the camera stopped
Rolling, to the shocked disbelief of the POWs,
She turned to the officer in charge and handed
Him all the little pieces of paper.'"

I looked into it and found this on Wikipedia;

"The POW camp visits also led to persistent stories—decades later circulated widely on the Internet and via email—that the POWs she met had spat on her, or attempted to sneak notes to her which she had then reported to the North Vietnamese, leading to further abuse. However, interviews with two of the alleged victims specifically named in the emails, found these allegations to be false as they had never met Fonda.[25]"

Wiki's citation is from Snopes, a very reliable fact checking site.

When I first heard the allegation about Obama not being born in the U.S., it came along with many other wild charges, all designed to make Obama look really awful. Compared to the other charges, I figured that conservatives should find the foreign birth story the most trivial.
I recalled the time when Arnold Schwarzenegger announced that he was going to run as a Republican for Gov. of California.
Even though conservatives always denounced Hollywood liberals whenever they offered their opinion on political matters, saying that being an actor was no qualification for politicking and that they should just "shut up and act", they just couldn't hide their excitement about Schwarzenegger.
Fantasizing that they had just found their next Ronald Reagan (former actor-turn-California governor), they immediately began talking about getting rid of the Constitutional requirement of "natural born" citizenship so that Arnold could run for President. So how important could this rule be to them?

Well, just like the double standard regarding Hollywood actors, it all depends on which way your political views tilt. Now that it was Obama running, this became the most important issue imaginable.
This is from the Birther's web site;

"Returning to the phrase “a natural born citizen,” you can now see that the Founding Fathers made a conscience effort to insure that the office of the President of the United States of America would have been held by only those men who were loyal to the cause of the United States of America. They selected as criteria for themselves loyalty above all else. The President of the United States must be above all else loyal to this Nation, and the principles that it was established upon. ...they knew that they could only trust the power of the office of President to a group of citizens who would have the best chance of being loyal to the country, those who only know America and only knew what it was like to be American."

Wow. That's powerful stuff. Especially the part after the ellipsis. The Birthers are telling us that the Founding Fathers are telling us that we can only trust Presidential power to citizens who only know America and only know what it is like to be American. So just knowing about other countries or what it's like to live in another country is reason to be barred from office! It's like the F.F.s knew, when they wrote the Constitution, that 220 years later someone like Obama would come along!

This is why the Birthers are "a bunch of fucking retards".

The "natural born citizen" requirement has to be the most antiquated rule in the entire Constitution. Even the conservatives were ready to chuck it when it suited them.
Whenever I would hear this requirement mentioned in the past, way before anyone even heard of Obama, it would always be pointed out that when the Founders wrote it, it was the Brits they had in mind because we had just ended the war with England.
They knew that our country needed immigrants, they just didn't like the idea of a hated Brit becoming president. Even the birthers seem to acknowledge this on their web site.
The way you can tell that the real reason they wrote that requirement was the circumstances of the war and the Brits, is that the idea that a citizen must be born on American soil, even if that person's parents are American citizens, just doesn't make any sense at all.
And even the concern about the Brits no longer makes sense being that they are now our most loyal and trusted allies.

The Birthers want us to believe that the Founders' intentions were perfectly in line with their own bullshit argument, "that we can't trust anyone who was exposed to any other culture," because this describes Obama.

But we are a country of immigrants, many of whom have been trusted with the most vital secrets imaginable. Henry Kissinger. Zbigniew Brzezinski.
The Manhattan Project would not have been possible if we had not trusted the foreign born scientists who built the Bomb.
Leo Szilard is responsible for giving us a head start by being the first scientist to see that atomic bombs were possible and convincing Einstein, another immigrant, to warn the President.
We wisely trusted foreign born scientists, who later became American citizens, like Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, John Von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, to name a few. And let's not forget about Edward Teller, who testified against the "natural born" American citizen, Oppenheimer, in order to get his security clearance revoked.
Teller was born in Hungary but became a trusted hero to the right wingers for his tireless efforts to build thermonuclear weapons and advance the arms race.
Most of the spies passing nuclear secrets to the Soviets were "natural born" citizens.

The Birthers act like they've exposed some sort of treachery that is being perpetrated by Obama against the American people.
After failing to destroy his character and reputation during a long campaign season and losing an open and fair election, they now are trying to overturn the will of the American people on the most trivial and insignificant grounds imaginable.

Let's take a closer look at the case of Obama.
His mother was an American with a pedigree of "natural born" citizenship that goes back many generations. She was actually related to Dick Cheney, a loyaler American anyone would be hard pressed to point to. She was married in Hawaii within 9 months before Obama's birth, meaning that he was conceived on American soil.
Her home address, as printed in the Hawaii newspaper announcing his birth, was in Hawaii. If, for some reason, by chance, she happened to be out of the country when he happened to come out of her womb, what fucking difference does that make? How does that violate the intent of the "law" in any significant way? It's a stupid technicality that the Birthers are using only because they hate Obama. If it was Sarah Palin or Michele Backmann they'd be making the same arguments I am.

I mean, how cheap can your ethics be if that's what stirs your righteous indignation?