This is from The Wall Street Journals 'Best of the Web' section, which after the commentary is pretty amusing. Thought some of you might like this one.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... el_opinionBy JAMES TARANTO
Did we ever call it. Two years ago, we wrote of birther demands for President Obama's archival birth certificate: "The release of the obsolete birth certificate would not 'resolve the issue' to those for whom it is not already resolved. They claim without basis that today's birth certificate is a fake; there is nothing to stop them from claiming without basis that yesterday's is as well."
As if on cue, WorldNutDaily.com, describing itself with no evident embarrassment as "the only news agency that has waged a relentless investigative campaign on questions swirling around the Obama's [sic] eligibility for nearly three years," quotes its own editor, Joseph Farah: "It is 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."
TalkingPointsMemo.com quotes dentist-cum-birther barrister Orly Taitz, who "thinks that the birth certificate should peg Obama's race using different language:
"In those years . . . when they wrote race, they were writing 'Negro' not 'African,' " Taitz says. "In those days nobody wrote African as a race, it just wasn't one of the options. It sounds like it would be written today, in the age of political correctness, and not in 1961 when they wrote white or Asian or 'Negro.' "
Actually--and TPM misses this point--the certificate does not peg the infant Obama's race at all. It lists his father's race as "African," which makes a certain amount of sense, seeing as how he was from Africa.
Carol Taber at TheAmericanThinker.com, whose theories occasioned some mirth last week, writes (italics hers): "It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Obama wasn't hiding anything that is on the present long form birth certificate. The evidence indicates that what he is hiding is that his long form birth certificate may not be genuine."
That "evidence" is laughably thin. Obama's birth certificate carries the serial number 10641. A pair of twin girls born the next day had certificates 10638 and 10637. This is not "incriminating," as Taber asserts it is, unless she is correct in speculating that birth-certificate serial numbers correspond exactly to the order in which children are born. If one makes that leap of faith, who exactly is supposed to be incriminated? Obama was four days old when his birth was certified. Even if he is as brilliant as his most fatuous admirers claim, it is not possible that he was precocious enough to pull off such a caper at that age.
Taber also identifies a martyr to birtherism:
Mr. Obama sent Lt. Col. Terry Lakin, a decorated combat-experienced Army flight surgeon, to jail because Obama refused to release his birth certificate. That document couldn't have been produced 6 months ago to prevent Lt. Col. Lakin's being manacled and shipped to Fort Leavenworth prison to rot in a cell? What possible explanation and what sort of character does Obama have, especially as Commander-in-Chief, for sending a soldier to jail, ruining his career, over the very same document the soldier had to produce for his military deployment orders?
What actually happened, as a sympathetic columnist explains in the Greeley (Colo.) Gazette, is that Lakin started raising questions with his superiors about Obama's eligibility to be president. When he wasn't satisfied with the answers, he disobeyed orders to deploy to Afghanistan. Obama didn't send him to prison, a jury in a court-martial did.
The suggestion that Obama is to blame for Lakin's crime is reminiscent of the hard-left group Code Pink's assertion, back in November 2009, that America should withdraw from Afghanistan and "even US military officers think so." One of the officers Code Pink cited to support that appeal to authority: "The Ft. Hood shooter was a Major who did not wish to be deployed to Afghanistan."
Whatever one's opinion of the current commander in chief, aren't conservatives supposed to believe in personal responsibility and military discipline?
Those on the other side of the political fence, meanwhile, have been busy living up to our prediction in Tuesday's column: "One other thing we expect is to start hearing about race again--not from the president himself so much as from his supporters, especially in the media. Here again, the message will be a negative one: not 'Wouldn't it be cool to have a black president?' but, 'If you vote to fire the first black president, you're racist.' "
As if on cue, the New York Times editorializes that "it was particularly galling to us" that the release of the old birth certificate "was in answer to a baseless attack with heavy racial undertones":
The birther question was never really about citizenship; it was simply a proxy for those who never accepted the president's legitimacy, for a toxic mix of reasons involving ideology, deep political anger and, most insidious of all, race. . . .
It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious "other" would have been conducted against a white president.
It's possible that some birthers have racial motives. But not only is it conceivable for such a campaign to be waged against a white president with a similar fact pattern, it has happened. As the Associated Press reported in 2009, Chester Arthur, the 21st white president, was rumored to have been born in Canada. Arthur's father, like Obama's, was an alien at the time of the future president's birth, although the elder Arthur did naturalize, in 1843.
The Washington Post reports that professional attention grabber Donald Trump responded to the White House release yesterday by raising "new questions":
"The word is, according to what I've read, is that he was a terrible student when he went [to] Occidental. He then gets to Columbia. He then gets to Harvard," Trump said. "I heard at Columbia he wasn't a very good student. He then gets to Harvard. How do you get into Harvard if you're not a good student?"
Obama, a former constitutional law professor and the first black president of the Harvard Law Review, is widely recognized as an intellectual heavyweight.
As an aside, that last sentence epitomizes what drives conservatives crazy--sometimes, alas, actually crazy--about the formerly mainstream media. Obama "is widely recognized as an intellectual heavyweight"? If they said this about Woodrow Wilson or Daniel Patrick Moynihan, we'd probably agree, but even then, it's more a statement of opinion than fact.
At any rate, according to Obama supporters, Trump's rhetorical question was racist. "That's just code for saying he got into law school because he's black," CBS's Bob Schieffer said. "This is an ugly strain of racism that's running through this whole thing."
Politico quotes another Obama pal likewise:
"Trump and the rest have played a very divisive card from the fact of his birth to now implying that he got into two Ivy League schools . . . by affirmative action, which clearly brings race into the matter," said the Rev. Al Sharpton. "It certainly enrages a lot of African-American voters, Latino voters and progressive whites that feel that this is the most divisive, polarizing tactic."
As Mickey Kaus notes, "Obama himself, while at Harvard, wrote that he had 'undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action.' " And you'd think that people who support both Obama and racial preferences would proudly cite the former as evidence of the latter's success, rather than getting defensive and angry whenever anyone even indirectly broaches the topic.
But it's the last sentence of the Sharpton quote that gives away the game. All this race talk is aimed at angering blacks and shaming whites into voting for Obama next year, whatever doubts they may have about his policies or his leadership. The birthers and the Obama supporters have this in common: Both seem to be terrified right now that their side will lose next year's election.
Your Pal,
Jubber
