by Jim Delaney, blogging at Opinerlog
reposted with permission of The Post and Email
If citizenship is bestowed by one's father, how can Obama be considered a "natural born Citizen" of the United States of America when his father was British?
(May 1, 2011) — Is the "silliness" over, as our thin-skinned and insufferably arrogant Obama characterized the BC issue last Wednesday? Yes. The "silliness" is over.
But, is the eligibility issue settled? Nope!
Why?
Without rehashing what should be–but clearly isn't–obvious to the dissembling press and to both Obama sycophants and defenders, the founders understood that for one to be a "natural born citizen", words which appear only in the Presidential Clause of the Constitution, one needs to have been born within the jurisdiction of the US (jus soli) AND AND AND be born of US citizen parents (jus sanguinis). At a minimum, to be a natural born citizen a person's father, from whom a person's nationality is derived (per E. Vattel's Law of Nations to which our framers subscribed) must have been a US citizen, this to preclude what the framers believed to be the awful prospect of a president with dual citizenship and loyalties.
His father was a Kenyan, a British subject, at the time of Barack's birth. Period.
So, assuming that the long form birth certificate FINALLY disclosed by the White House today is the real thing, and I have no reason to believe that it isn't, we've still only solved half the riddle.
In all the mealy-mouthed and deliberately mendacious MSM discussions about the elusive birth certificate, what has continually been lost in the cacophony is the central issue of "natural born citizenship." Like many others who had reasonable doubts about Obama's place of birth, I had always felt that even if he had been born on the White House balcony, his presidential eligibility remained in serious constitutional doubt. And so it does today. Nothing has really changed.
In my humble estimation, what Obama, aka Mr. Transparency, intended to pull off on Wednesday was a clever and cynical ploy to fatally undermine the credibility of the so-called "birthers," thus shutting down all further probes into his background (education, associations) which still remain shrouded in needless mystery and disturbing suspicion.
And one other lingering question which I'm sure few want to hear: did he legally lose his US citizenship when he was adopted by Lolo Soetoro in Indonesia? And if so, was his US citizenship properly restored upon his return to the USA? I still don't know the answer to this unsettling question. And until I do, this constitutional issue remains very much alive.
One interesting side note: all along, many detractors on the right (like Karl Rove, among others) speculated that Barry, the quintessential political thug that he is, would deliberately keep the birth certificate issue alive until he was able to divulge the certificate at a politically sensitive moment in his re-election campaign, this to utterly destroy the credibility of the birthers on the left, right and in the middle. Well, even Barry understood that this festering BC issue was weighing heavily against him, and he also knew that it was becoming increasingly more difficult to stop further probing unless he made a big show of disclosing his BC. Thus, his precipitous and haughty disclosure of his BC which he hopes will effectively end any further questions about his murky background and eligibility.
And you know what? Sadly enough, this strategy just might work. Enough Americans might actually believe that birthers are nothing more than pesky, wild-eyed conspiratorial theorists blinded by their loathing of Obama, his race and his leftist ideology, and that Obama's integrity and virtue have been unfairly sullied by these brigands. Well, he can hope that's what most Americans will believe. But, if I were he I wouldn't count on it.
The Post and Email
