Now that President Barack Obama’s legal team went out of its way to get a copy of Obama’s so-called long-form birth certificate, it’s time for the birthers to eat crow, right? Not so much. It hasn’t taken long for members of the “birther” movement to grab their backup plans.
There was no unified reaction in the birther community to the release of a long-form copy of Obama’s birth certificate, which showed that yes, he was born in Hawaii, as he’s said all along — and as he had already demonstrated by the release of his official Hawaiian birth certificate years ago. But the responses have fallen into a few categories: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and — for a limited few birthers — acceptance.
Some questioned the authenticity of the long-form birth certificate: “After more than two years of concealment and obfuscation, this document must be submitted for forensics testing to determine its authenticity,” said supporters of an Army doctor in prison for refusing to deploy due to his concerns about Obama’s eligibility. Orly Taitz — who fell for fake Kenyan birth certificates on eBay — told TPM she still has her suspicions about the document provided by the state of Hawaii.
Still others — like an aide to an author of a state birther bill — were troubled that the document said “certificate of live birth” and not “birth certificate.”
There were those who worried about the birth certificate numbers assigned to Obama because “birth certificates issued to twin girls born one day later at Kapi’olani hospital, the Nordykes, are the Rosetta Stone of deciphering” both the long and short form birth certificates.
Others like Donald Trump declared victory on the birth certificate issue and immediately began asking when Obama was going to release his college records.
It’s never been about the birth certificate, others like Phillip Berg claimed — arguing that Obama renounced his American citizenship when he lived in Indonesia.
The conservative conspiracy website WorldNetDaily quickly argued that the President’s place of birth wasn’t the issue — the issue is where the President’s father was born.
Citing the book “The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists,” WND argued that “according to correspondence from the original framers of the Constitution as well as multiple Supreme Court rulings and the legal writings that helped establish the principles of the Constitution, Obama is not eligible to serve as president since his father was not a U.S. citizen.”
In an email to TPM, WND founder Joseph Farah said that a “review of our work will show ‘natural born citizenship’ has always been the key issue.”
“I don’t know where you got the idea that we focused on where he was born,” Farah wrote. “We’ve done hundreds of stories on the subject – most of which revolved around the hiding of the birth certificate, which was until today, the MOST important story.”
On his website, Farah wrote that it was “important to remember there are still dozens of other questions concerning this question of eligibility that need to be resolved to assure what has become a very skeptical public concerning Barack Obama’s parentage, his adoption, his citizenship status throughout his life and why he continues to cultivate a culture of secrecy around his life.”
But as Harvard Law School Professor Laurence Tribe wrote in an email to Michael Isikoff, Farah’s contention is “a totally wacky argument, without any conceivable merit. … The 14th amendment unambiguously and expressly confers U.S. citizenship on everyone ‘born … in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'”
Wrote Tribe: “This means that Barack Obama was a U.S. citizen at birth, independent of the citizenship or age of either or both of his biological or adoptive parents. … This birther thing is a moving target, rather like the creatures in the ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ Driving a stake through its heart seems incapable of killing it.”
