Rick Moran is one conservative who’s had it with the people pushing the Obama-is-not-eligible argument:
It is sometimes easy when you live in the virtual world of the internet to look at people like the Birthers or Truthers and dismiss them out of hand as a small minority of lunatics who are best left alone to wallow in their paranoid kookiness.
Such might be good advice for dealing with those who believe we never landed on the moon, or who think that we have dead aliens on ice at Area 51. But, as I warned my fellow conservatives in this post about the Founding Freeper’s call for “revolution” and removal of all elected representatives from the president on down, we ignore some of these groups, including the Birthers, at the peril of having conservatism severely damaged by having their ideas associated with the mainstream right.
Yes, there numbers may be small relative to the whole. But they are actively committed to spreading their lunacy far and wide and are gaining converts and cash as I write this.
The question then becomes do we try and isolate, chastise, and ultimately drive out the paranoid purveyors of utterly fantastical notions of Obama’s origins while they are still a small enough group that a concerted effort could succeed? Or do we wait and see how big they get before acting, thus risking a backlash against the right from the voter?
Moran has his own solution, and it’s a drastic one:
To prevent many diseases from harming our health, we inoculate ourselves so that an illness will not develop. I propose something similar in dealing with the Birthers. For my part, anyone who leaves a comment on this site, on any post, that advances any birther “theory” will be banned from accessing my writings.
Some might think this a bad idea in that I will forgo “debate” or perhaps not allow a Birther to be convinced otherwise. That’s nonsense. My experience with Birthers has been that they don’t want to hear any contrary evidence, that they have closed their mind so completely to the truth that arguing with a brick wall would be easy by comparison.
Moran is right about one thing; there is very little point in debating the hard-core birthers. People who visit Orly Taitz’s website, World Net Daily, or The Right Side of Life on a regular basis and believes what they read there without question is not going to be persuaded by citations to Hawaiian authorities confirming that they have examined and verified the accuracy of Obama’s birth records, or that the Certificate of Live Birth that he has made available since last year is the only form of birth verification that the state provides.
In fact, for most of them, producing the birth certificate won’t end the debate at all. Consider this exchange during Orly Taitz’s appearance on Lou Dobbs program last week:
TAITZ: Let me say one more thing, in order to be the president, you have to have to have two parents that are citizens. Obama’s father was never a citizen of this country.
The birthers base this argument on a definition of “natural born citizen” that was given by a Swiss philosopher named Emmerich de Vatel. The problem is that the edition of the work in which de Vattel developed this definition of the phrase wasn’t translated into English and published outside of Switzerland under ten years after the Constitution was drafted. Therefore, it’s impossible for de Vattel’s work to have been any influence at all upon the Founders when the Article II was drafted.
Moreover, it’s worth noting that, under Orly Taitz’s definition and not counting Obama, the United States has had four Presidents since 1820 who had at least one parent who was not an American citizen at the time of their birth — Andrew Jackson, James Buchanan, Chester Alan Arthur, and Herbert Hoover. At no time did anyone make the argument that any of these men were not “natural born citizens,” so there’s no reason to think that the Founders ever intended to apply the standard that Taitz does.
And, I guess that diversion above is where I disagree with Rick’s approach.
Rather than banning the birthers, I think the best strategy is to confront their arguments and rebut them whenever necessary. Will it change the minds of the tin-foil hat conspiracy theorists ? Of course not, but to the extent they are succeeding in making their arguments sound legitimate to mainstream conservatives, or voters in general, there needs to be someone out there explaining just how woefully wrong they are.
As much as I can, I’ll be doing my own small part in that regard.
The idea that Obama isn’t a citizen is nutty – but the work cited above not being translated into English isn’t a very good argument showing that they are nutty.
It is completely plausible that the Founding Fathers were aware of the work. They did associate with many people that could have read the work in its original form and shared the concept with them.
Arguing ‘original intent’ of any type is a fools game – all of the founding fathers had different intents. Adams and Jefferson spent the waning days of their lives arguing about what the Constitution ‘meant’ what possible hope do we have of trying to figure it out?