The Certificate

I believe men landed on the moon.

I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in shooting JFK.

I do not believe that the Bilderburgers or the CFR or any other international body (and certainly not "the Joooooosssss" control world affairs.

I KNOW that Muslim radicals flew planes into the WTC, and that it was NOT the work of the U.S. government, and particularly not George W. Bush.

And for a long time I believed there was nothing to this business of where Barack Obama was born. Now, I'm not so sure.

In the past two weeks, there has been a veritable blizzard of screeching diatribes against the so-called "birthers," namely those who question Obama's citizenship. What's amazing is that half of these howls have come from people on the "right," such as Debra Saunders and Ann Coulter. There is an old, WW II maxim for bomber pilots: "When you start seeing flak, you're over the target." Based on the amount of "flak" that this issue is suddenly generating, I'd say maybe there's a target there.

Not long ago Lou Dobbs of CNN (!, yes, CNN!), while not explicitly endorsing the issue, had on guests who were actually allowed to raise it. This birth certificate issue is so toxic that mainstream shows---even on Fox---refuse to touch it. Many conservatives are afraid of being labeled kooks. (That didn't seem to bother Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich in the campaign. True, neither got many votes, but you never questioned where they stood!) But this is not a kooky issue.

Do I think Obama was born in the U.S.? Honestly, I don't know. But what troubles me is that it is so damn easy to prove it, and that Obama has not done that: get the original, paper copy and display it. The confusions by the "deniers" on this are remarkable: they say it has been verified, but some critics say that this "verification" took place after Hawaiian officials claim the records "were destroyed." Then there is the issue of the "Certificate of Live Birth" vs. a "birth certificate," and it appears you can be a non-citizen and get the former. Then there is the matter of the passport. Supposedly, Pakistan was on a no-go list when Obama went there; other officials say that's not true, that it was never on such a list. But what NONE of them have done is to produce Obama's passport!!!

Now, folks, this is real simple. I'm sitting next to my desk drawers. On one side I can pull out my passport in 5 seconds. On the other, I can produce a physical version of my birth certificate in the same amount of time. I have not spent $1 million dollars trying to hide either, as Obama has.

So let me repeat: I'm not a "birther" yet. But I am a thinking person with a skeptical mind and, for something so easy to lay to rest, I find it deeply troubling that Obama has chosen to skirt the issue as he has. And to you conservatives who think this is a "problem" for our side, it's only a problem because of the constitutional chaos the REALITY of a foreign birth could cause . . . and ya'll know what I'm talking about. We'd have to get rid of the guy who is in there (an impeached Obama would become a martyr), we'd get that utter buffoon Joe Biden, we'd have to determine the legality of every single law or executive order this Marxist has signed. It would be a nightmare---and I suspect this, more than anything, is really why many conservatives don't want to "go there." But sometimes, you have to do what needs to be done.

The "birthers" are getting lots of flak. Does that mean they are near a target?

************ADDENDUM: Ok, I did some quick, but pretty detailed, investigation into this. I asked some direct questions and got some direct answers, some of which came from this site: http://www.westernjournalism.com/?page_id=2697

I'm sure many of you have seen this before, but there is the upshot of this long and detailed analysis:
*There actually IS a clear difference between a "Certification of Live Birth" and an official "Birth Certificate." Using the former, you cannot get a passport, among other things. (Now, the terms Birth Certificate 3 and Birth Certificate 4 are from the Western Journalism Center, and not government terms.)
*According to the site, a "Birth Certificate 3" form involves the folling: "In 1961, if a person was born in Hawaii but not attended by a physician or midwife, then, up to the first birthday of the child, a “Delayed Certificate” could be filed, which required that “a summary statement of the evidence submitted in support of the acceptance for delayed filing or the alteration [of a file] shall be endorsed on the certificates”, which “evidence shall be kept in a special permanent file.” In other words, a government official of some sort can issue this based on the statement of a family member up to one year after the fact and can even be issued on the word of one of the grandparents, and the mother or father do not have to be present (!)
*But . . . a "Birth Certificate 4" type can be issued if "a child is born in Hawaii, for whom no physician or mid wife filed a certificate of live birth, and for whom no Delayed Certificate was filed before the first birthday, then a Certificate of Hawaiian Birth could be issued upon testimony of an adult (including the subject person [i.e. the birth child as an adult]) if the Office of the Lieutenant Governor was satisfied that a person was born in Hawaii, provided that the person had attained the age of one year.
*So Western Journalism Center concludes the certificate in question is either a BC3 or, if forged, BC4. Why would anyone think it might be forged? Because there was no internet in 1961, so there is no digital file. Therefore, "Given the statutes in force in 1961, the Certification of Live Birth proves nothing unless we know what is on the original birth certificate. There are several legal areas (involving ethnic quotas and subsidy) for which the state of Hawaii up until June 2009 did not accept its computer-generated Certification of Live Birth as sufficient proof of birth in Hawaii or parentage."