Obama Citizenship

SC Rep Fears ?Birthers? if GOP Gains 2010 House Majority

By Phil

Some days I have to wonder why it is that some politicos are bringing up allegedly “fringe” theories. Is it a means to do something positive for themselves while also attempting to be “shut-down”-negative to the opposition?

You would think that House Minority Whip James Clyburn (D-SC) would get a clue after all of the railing against the Tea Party movement by his own party:

Going negative and calling “us” names or using FUD [Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt] tactics is just as likely to backfire against you as it is to hurt “us.”

It certainly hasn’t worked against the Tea Party and I doubt it’s going to work against the “birthers,” those individuals who align themselves with questioning President Obama’s presidential eligibility.

TheHill.com published the following quote from the third highest-ranking Democrat as a rhetorical response to the House Oversight panel’s ranking GOP Member, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA)’s assertion that a potential GOP majority would issue “subpoenas everywhere:”

“The White House will be full-time responding to subpoenas about where the president may or may not have been born, whether his mother and father were ever married, and whether his wife’s family is from Georgetown or Sampit…

That will define the next two years of the president’s administration.”

Rep. Issa is denying the “birther” threat:

?The Democratic Caucus doesn?t take Jim Clyburn seriously ? Americans shouldn?t take his ridiculous claims seriously either,” said Issa spokesman Kurt Bardella in an e-mail.

The Hill went on an interesting little editorial rant:

Obama was born in Hawaii, and the White House released a digitally scanned image of his birth certificate. But that has failed to silence arguments that he was not born in the U.S.

While it could be true that Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, nobody knows exactly who released the alleged photo of a document on a third-party web site, because nobody’s ever been forthright even with this bit of information.

Furthermore, even if Mr. Obama were born geographically in Hawaii, sites like FactCheck.org plainly admit that, at birth, he was, at best, a British subject, by law, according to Kenya’s constitution in 1961.

Part of the reason that The Hill correctly notes that this [sic] “has failed to silence arguments” about the President’s eligibility is because nothing definitive about the President’s past has ever been substantiated; most of it has mostly been a quest of guesses.

The rest of the piece talks about how Rep. Clyburn essentially wishes that the Fairness Doctrine were back in place, because then sites like mine would effectively be moderated into silence (I would, in theory, have to give equal time to the opposition — some would say I have in the past), because individuals such as myself engage in allegedly “hate” speech against the President (by daring to question him).

I think Rep. Issa is right: I do not expect the GOP to go after substantiating Mr. Obama’s background; that will remain up to the citizens to do. However, I do expect the next presidential campaign to be fraught with eligibility questions, as even the Judiciary has agreed, practically en mass, that then will be the appropriate time to pursue the question.

Of course, all of this still leaves my original question open:

What is Rep. Clyburn concerned about? Is he full of hot air? Is he trying to silence critics?

If you want to keep an issue from becoming an issue, the worst thing you want to do is go front-and-center with it and make it an issue!

-Phil

phil [at] therightsideoflife [dot] com

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Full post as published by The Right Side of Life on September 27, 2010 (boomark / email).