Trump-ed Up Charges

Every few months, someone pops up and revives the question of President Obama’s country of birth. The correct answer is: the United States. He was born in Hawai’i in 1961. His campaign released his birth certificate in 2008. But that doesn’t stop people from speculating, often hysterically, that he was actually born in Kenya and he has no legal standing to be President. It reminds me a little of C when he doesn’t want to go to school and he shouts at me that it’s really the weekend. As if just being loud enough on a point will make it true.

Lately Donald Trump is all over the place spouting this “birther” nonsense and also the nonsense that he might consider running for President next year. I give him the side-eye then notice that the new season of The Apprentice just started. Coincidence? Marketing ploy? You decide.

Donald is getting tons of attention about this which, per his usual modus operandi, is causing him to talk more about the whole thing. His latest argument is that no one from the hospital is coming forward to say they remember Obama’s birth. Well, the OB who delivered him is dead. So he’s out. As for the nurses and other hospital staff, the ones who might still be living, how realistic is it to think they would remember an individual birth that happened 50 years ago? Do you think the Donald’s mom’s OB remembers his birth? I’m pretty sure my OB, anesthesiologist, and L&D nurse wouldn’t remember C’s birth and that was less than 4 years ago. (Interestingly, my mom’s OB probably would remember my birth because my mom was a nurse midwife at that hospital and they were friends. That makes me a little fancier than either Trump or Obama. Go me!).

One of Trump’s other gambits is waving his own birth certificate around to prove how easy they are to get. Yes. If you are one of the people named in the certificate. Other people cannot get ahold of one because most state departments of vital records prefer not to be party to identity theft. So, unless you name appears on a birth certificate or you have a court order in hand, you probably can’t just stroll into a government office and expect to get a copy of a birth certificate. Duh.

The real root of the issue is not all the ridiculous facets of the argument against President Obama’s citizenship, it’s the question of why on earth anyone is questioning it in the first place. If he were indeed a subversive agent from a foreign nation intent on undermining the US Constitution, why hasn’t he begun to do so in any meaningful way? The man has been in public service for decades now and he hasn’t succeeded in undoing even one Constitutional principle. For someone as nefarious and evil as the birthers claim he is, he’s remarkably inept at toppling the US of A.

Oh! Unless his stint as a Constitutional law professor is the REAL conspiracy. Maybe while he was there, teaching impressionable young lawyers-to-be he was implanting un-American ideas about the Constitution with the idea that some of them would be appointed to federal judgeships and interpret the Constitution according to his specification. And he ran for President so he could execute phase two of the plan and do all the appointing himself! Yes! That must be it! THAT is the plan! I have uncovered it!

Except that of all of Obama’s judicial nominees, only one of them went to University of Chicago and he graduated in 1980 when Obama was only about 19.

And another conspiracy theory bites the dust when faced with facts and a modicum of common sense.

What it comes down to is three different possibilities. First, our President is actually a foreign national who has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government with an eye toward destroying it but he’s breathtakingly bad at the destruction part. Second, our President is actually a foreign national who has infiltrated the highest levels of the US government with an eye toward destroying it and he’s actually doing an awesome job at it but I just don’t recognize that because I’m a commie liberal pinko hippie loser. Or third, our President is an American citizen and the duly elected leader of the executive branch and questioning that makes people look silly. I mean, it’s not like he lost the popular vote in an historically tight Presidential election and went on to win the electoral college on the grounds of a Supreme Court decision about the technical rights of states to conduct, or not conduct,  recounts in the face of questionable vote tallies. I mean, that kind of a situation would really be cause for questioning the validity of an election, especially if it happened in full view of the media. Can you even imagine?

The fact is that Barack Obama is the sitting President of the United States. Nowhere is it written that you have to like that fact. But all the machinations to deny this fact are unbecoming to Americans.  Our whole history is a litany of “Well, that sucked. What now?” stories. Surely the people who wish someone else was President can adopt that attitude toward the Obama Presidency and stop with the “He’s not an Am-mur-i-cun!” garbage. It makes the rest of us question your motives for saying it and, believe me, the motives we assign you in our minds are not pretty. They involve words like “racist”, “xenophobic” and “schmuck”. And you know what? I’d rather be called a sympathizer to an allegedly Kenyan-born, Islamic Presidential pretender than sympathetic to racist, xenophobic, schmucks like Trump. Any day.