Barack Obama is a citizen of the United States. The State of Hawaii says so, and that’s good enough for me.
But let’s just grant, for the sake of argument, that the birthers are correct, and that President Obama can’t really prove without a shadow of a doubt that he was born in the United States. So what? Leave it to a bunch of right-wing corporate attornies to try and win their case by exploiting a legal technicality, a loophole, an irrelevancy.
After all, what does it mean to be a citizen? There are thousands of people in this country who could produce a long-form birth certificate with a baby footprint and a doctor’s signature on it who otherwise do not deserve to be citizens, who couldn’t pass a citizenship test if their lives depended on it, who have never taken advantage of their status as citizens other than to vote for a Republican Presidential candidate every four years, who couldn’t even tell you the names of their Senators. Barack Obama WAS a Senator, not to mention a Harvard Law School graduate, editor of the Harvard Law Review, and, of course, President of the United States. He’s more of a citizen than most people in this country. He earned his citizenship long ago. A citizen is as a citizen does.
But of course that exposes the core of the anti-immigration argument — the notion that citizenship is like a country club. You have to be voted in by the existing members, who can blackball you for any reason they like, including the color of your skin. Isn’t that what this is really all about, when you strip away the crap about certificates of live birth versus birth certificates, all the manufactured “evidence” and misquoted grandmothers? How could someone whose father was born in Africa possibly be President? Or a citizen? Or more than 3/5 of a human being? My God, what happened to the America we’ve always known, the one that was run by white male Christians? We’re losing it! Think of something, damn it!
Sorry, fellas, the jig is up. Nobody really believes you except a handful of unreconstructed racists and proto-Nazis. And if you don’t knock it off, the people are going to take away YOUR citizenship.
