RangerDave wrote:
Vindicarre wrote:
I put it out there as more of a "Why not just put this **** to rest?", because it would seem to be a pretty simple thing. All the wrangling just makes something smell fishy. /shrug
He
has put it to rest, though. He's provided a birth certificate, and the birth announcement in the newspaper at the time has been widely reported. Demands to see yet another, even more detailed version of his birth certificate is just conspiracy theorists grasping at straws. There's just no genuine question here - the dude was born in Hawaii.
And frankly, I don't blame him for not jumping through that additional hoop to satisfy the whackos. Even if he provides whatever extra documents they want, they'll just find something else to take issue with. That's how conspiracy theories work. More to the point, the widespread and obsessive focus on this issue is, I'm sorry, racist. It is just not a coincidence that the first black President in history is also the first one that large percentages of white people think might not be a natural born American citizen. That's not to say everyone who thinks there might be some doubt is a racist - the rumor/conspiracy-theory has been injected into the general Republican bloodstream now - but the origin and the core of the birther meme definitely is.
I don't know RD, if he'd just allowed his birth certificate to be shown it would go away. As for the citizenship/racist line of thought, I will remind you that before McCain was even nominated, it was becoming an issue for him, even though it was
really a non-issue in that case. Yet, it died once evidence was presented ruling it out. If Obama had taken care of this from the get-go, instead of obfuscating, wrangling and dodging, it wouldn't be an issue either.
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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko