Thanks for reposting this. It’s Eligibility dynamite, and cannot be posted often enough.
At the same time, I have to ask why it takes Paine to inject a note of sanity into this debate? Liberals I can understand. All they ever cared about was protecting Obama, and no claim is too absurd for them to make on his behalf. I’ve read the comments they make about him. It’s scary/creepy, how worshipful they are. The crime of selling the USA out to our worst enemies is a pleasant one for Obots, if it means validating their Number One Hero. Besides, they *want* to ‘fundamentally change’ the USA, so it’s all good for them.
But conservatives??? How on earth have they bought into this ‘dirt only’ twaddle??? It’s not merely insanity—it’s brainless insanity.
Try this. Have an American gal go to China and give birth. Bring the baby back to the USA and raise/indoctrinate him/her to hate, w a burning, unquenchable passion, not only communism but the Chinese people themselves. In due time send the born-on-Chinese-soil individual back to China and let him/her live there a couple of decades.
Then say to the Chinese leaders, ‘This is a natural born Chinese citizen; accept him/or into the highest ranks of your government.’
Ha ha. Oh yes, they will welcome this ‘NBC’ w open arms. They will be delighted to establish him or her in the upper echelons of Chinese power brokerage.
An Iranian was quoted recently scoffing at the idea that being born on Iranian soil makes a person an Iranian. This is because, dark and twisted as Islam is, it nevertheless leaves a person free to reject pure, mindnumbingly stupid twaddle, at least when it comes to Natural Born Iranian Citizenship.
Only in America, where liberals rule and have ruled for so many decades, is this kind and level of stupidity accepted. Liberals salivate at the idea of putting one of America’s most rabid half-foreign enemies [i.e.: Barack Hussein Obama] in a position to destroy the Republic as we know it, and as the Framers established it. Anybody w any kind of grasp of modern liberalism knows this.
But why would conservatives jump onboard? How can they look in the mirror and claim they’re seeing the face of a sane individual??? They believe a couple of Red Chinese can birth a Natural Born American Citizen, simply by arranging for the child to be born on a particular patch of dirt. That is not mere stupidity—it is psychotic.
I have said before and I say it again, it can only be explained by a desire to look smart and sophisticated in the eyes of liberals. I.e.: some conservatives are so intellectually insecure, they’re willing to embrace bizarrely stupid ideas, merely so as to be able to say, ‘I’m not one of those wingnut birthers’.
If that is not the explanation, then what is it? I ask because I am trying to understand. Some of my fellow conservatives embrace a suicidal, uber-modern-lib/Obot-inspired ‘interpretation’ of NBC.
Why???
The flaw in this thinking is two-fold:
1. If they let this one go by, what's to stop someone from ignoring, say, the 4-year term limit for president? We've already seen the Article I power of Congress to determine when it is in recess be ignored, as well as the Senate's advice and consent power subverted with unconfirmed "czars." What's next? Suspend habieus corpus? Eliminate Amendment 5 rights of due process?
2. Ignoring the natural-born requirement may not affect the current status of elites, but it will affect the posterity of the nation. That is why I also post the Preamble, because a nation's posterity is its natural-born children. They are the next generation who carries forward the culture that defines being an American. When the Framers said that they established the Constitution to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to... our posterity," they meant to create a nation that can be handed down to their children, and their children's children.
Today, the only "blessing" that our elites (liberal and Republican) are "securing" for our "posterity" is the burden of massive debt that is being accumulated by the elites in order to sustain the high station of the elites.
They see how willing the elites are to twist plain-language meanings of the law, as well as to use fear and intimidation against those who call out their abuse of constitutional powers. They figure that if the law won't apply to the elites, then why should it be applied to them?
What we are seeing with the Occupy protesters is the beginnings of a push-back because they see that the behaviors of the elites is hand-cuffing the next generation from being able to exercise the same freedoms to pursue their own interests that the elites enjoyed when they became of-age.
The Occupy protesters are misplaced in their anger against corporations and banks because of partisan political interests, but that also serves the interests of the elites to maintain their station. Instead of calling out Democrats for conspiring to hide the lack of Constitutional qualification for Obama, Republicans are being encouraged to make good on Obama's qualification by offering up equally unqualified candidates of their own, like Marco Rubio or Piyush Jindal. The Occupy protests are the pressure that Democrats are putting on Republicans to comply, with the unspoken threat of unleashing the "99%" with cries that Republicans hate women, or Republicans want dirty air, or Republicans are taking your jobs away.
In 20 years, Nancy Pelosi will be dead, Harry Reid will be dead, Mitch McConnell will be dead, but the Occupy protesters will be in their early 40's, with a good 40 more years to go.
The elites in the United States have squandered the posterity of this nation, and the posterity knows it. And it started with an abused definition of what it means to be "ourselves and our posterity" and how that weaves throughout our entire constitutional republic.
What Paine shows us is the honesty of the debate that took place in 1791, and is a reflection of the dishonesty of the same debate that is taking place today, 221 years later.
-PJ