Tuesday, December 09, 2008

Is Obama Legally Allowed to be President?

Yes. Yes he is. He was born in the United States and is a United States Citizen. A few conservatives, very few, are asserting that this is not true - they held a press conference yesterday at the National Press Club, in which they made several outlandish assertions, according to this report by Salon's Mike Madden.
Taitz -- the lead attorney in the case the Supreme Court declined to hear Monday morning -- kept making stranger and stranger assertions. At one point, she asked why the government had fined broadcasters for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," but didn't intervene to force the media to report on Obama's allegedly phony birth certificate. She claimed Obama holds passports from at least four countries, compared him to Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, equated the "controversy" about Obama to Watergate, and finished her tour-de-force presentation by saying that if Obama can claim he's a U.S. citizen and win an election, then so could just about anyone. "If a person can become a presidential candidate only based on his own statement," she said, "then somebody like Osama bin Laden, theoretically, can come and write a statement, 'I'm eligible,' and we should put him on the ballot, too?"
Now here's a sentence I didn't think I'd ever write; let's turn to David Horowitz for some perspective.
Conservatives are supposed to respect the organic nature of human societies. Ours has been driven by profound disagreements that have been deepening over many years. We are divided not only about political facts and social values, but also about what the Constitution itself means. The crusaders on this issue choose to ignore these problems and are proposing to deny the will of 64 million voters by appealing to 5 Supreme Court Justices (since no one is delusional enough to think that the 4 liberal justices are going to take the presidency away from Obama). What kind of conservatism is this?

It is not conservatism; it is sore loserism and quite radical in its intent.
I suppose it says something about these claims that even a guy like Horowitz finds them a distraction. And that something is that these claims are very very shaky indeed.

No comments: