Thursday, July 30, 2009

Andy on the Birth-Certificate Business    [Kevin D. Williamson]

I can't say that I'm much in love with Brother Andy's piece on Obama and the birthers today. Andy concedes that the birthers' fundamental contention, that Obama is somehow ineligible to serve as president of the United States, is nonsense — and utter nonsense it is — and yet he attempts to invest that nonsensical claim with broader meaning. I do not believe that there is anything morally or politically meaningful in the fact that Obama's father was, at the time of Obama's birth, a citizen of a country that didn't quite exist yet. (Obama was born in 1961; Kenya became independent in 1963, so it is non-obvious that Obama was "born a Kenyan citizen," as Andy writes.)

Andy also writes that Lolo Soetoro (or, as Andy twice puts it, "Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro") "almost certainly adopted the youngster," which seems to me a stretch. Almost certainly? Based on speculations about one private-school document from 1960s Indonesia? Please. If we're going to have a discussion about public records and documents and such, where are the adoption papers? And if we cannot even establish that there is a real reason to assume that such papers exist, why traffick in hypotheses of this sort?

Which brings me to one thing that was not addressed by Andy or by our editorial: The "birthers" are, in no small number, kooks. They engage in intemperate, paranoid, hysterical speculation, and not always from the best of motives. One has to be prudent about one's associations. Yeah, I think Eisenhower was a little soft on the North Koreans and was largely responsible for one of the worst socialist projects in American history, but I'm not ready to join the John Birch Society and call him a Communist agent. You can't separate birtherism from the birthers, and the folks screaming at Mike Castle down in Delaware don't sound to me like obvious contributors to a responsible, sensible conservatism.

Finally, I've never understood the interest in Obama and religion. It's clear to me what church he belongs to: The Church of Barack Obama, which has one sacrament and 365 electoral votes. I fear that there are some on the right who are willing to entertain any nonsense that reflects poorly on the president. And while we're out looking for imams under Baby Obama's childhood bed, the grown-up Obama is going to nationalize our health-care system and spend us into national pauperdom.

07/30 12:21 PMShare