There are more than 160 comments on the wire story about President Obama's birth certificate. People are mad at each other over this. There's a lot of "So's your old man" quality to the discourse. One commenter asked another commenter if he wore a tin foil hat all day. (I favor the armadillo helmet worn by Sheev in the Dukes of Hazzard movie; it beats tin foil like a drum in screening out government mind-probe waves).
Some of the commenters are still suggesting that the birth certificate released today is a forgery and want some scientific analysis and testing. Fine with me. Bring in a bi-partisan team of scientists. And after they're done and determine that it's legit, we can all speculate as to whether they were bought off.
A certain segment of the body politic will never be convinced that a group of conspirators didn't get together in the summer of 1961, convince the Honolulu Sunday Advertiser to print a bogus birth announcement and pay off a bunch of doctors and nurses to gin up a phony birth certificate for a baby boy they had a hunch might be president some day.
These conspirators were particularly far-sighted, because in 1961, it didn't look too promising that a baby of an African dad would grow up to be president of the United States any time in the next two centuries. Given the fact that people of African ancestry were encountering some difficulties in the summer of '61 gaining admission to certain public schools, drinking from certain water fountains, getting seated at certain lunch counters, sitting anywhere they wanted in certain motion picture houses, being able to live in certain parts of town and, oh, for another example, vote in certain states, picking Barack Hussein Obama as the Chosen One was a real long shot bet for Manchurian Candidate conspirators. Of that you can be certain.
You really have to hand it to them.
Comments
N.C. Birth Certificate Issues
Tue, 05/03/2011 - 00:36 — proctorThere are other types of birth certificate issues which need to be faced right here in North Carolina. The processes required for updating one's state driver's license or even obtaining an official non-driver's state ID card have become more complicated to the point that they are interfering with opportunities for homeless citizens to take advantage of job opportunities in other locations in order to "get off the street" and back into a normal residential/work situation.
It used to be that having a copy of an official birth certificate from one of North Carolina's 100 counties was enough to get you "properly identified" in order to qualify for a test for renewing an N.C. driver's license, or in the case of those whose licenses have expired and were not renewed for one reason or another, obtaining one of those "non-driver state ID cards." But now, with the re-issuing of Social Security cards in play, and "security mailouts" of both driving and non-driving state ID cards, a person who needs to ride a bus, train or plane to get to a new employment location can be plumb out of luck even if he or she has a proper birth certificate in hand. And even if he or she has been "in the system" of computer ID records one's entire life in North Carolina.
Things are almost at the point of being like the 19th Century in Russia when it was difficult to travel within the Russian countryside, let alone leaving the country to travel to Italy, Germany or France. We are evolving a state bureaucracy in Raleigh which would have been the envy of any self-aggrandizing Russian clerk or Soviet commissar. No wonder a recent candidate for state office in North Carolina made comparisons between the Raleigh of today and the Moscow of olden times although since the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian leaders have made laudable efforts to modernize the official procedures of government from Minsk to Vladivostock.
But in North Carolina in the 21st Century, you can run into situations where a person who has been unable to afford a dwelling, even when offered substantial employment opportunities which could lead to a restoration of domestic tranquility and armed with a viable, official birth certificate document, still cannot obtain a state photo ID card needed to board a bus, train or plane for a new job location elsewhere in the Old North State or, heaven forbid, in some other state in the Union.
So it would seem we could do better in this regard. For if having a lawful birth certificate can help you keep serving in a public office to which you have been duly elected, then a birth certificate should also be a passport to transportation access to new job opportunities down the road which can move a person back above the poverty line.
David P. McKnight
P.J. O'Rourke had it right
Wed, 04/27/2011 - 20:10 — friedensenThanks for a spot-on post regarding this lunacy that passes for political discourse in 2011, Dan. I'm reminded of a most useful term coined by P. J. O'Rourke in his seminal book, "Parliament of Whores." He referred to one segment of our populace as the "Perenially Indignant." The "PI's" are folks who just have to be indignant about something to get through the day. And O'Rourke noted that for many of these people, if their primary problem is solved somehow or just goes away, they have an innate and instinctual need to find something else about which to be indignant.
Forged birth certificate, indeed...