Obama citizenship issue finally gets noticed by mainstream media; and my doubts about Philip Berg
While I have previously
expressed some skepticism about Pennsylvania attorney Philip Berg’s claim that Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen and thus not qualified for the presidency, and while there is also a lot of embarrassing lunacy among Republicans on this issue, the fact remains that Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate
has still not been released, and therefore his status as a natural-born citizen is still in doubt. This is a valid issue and I support the parties who are pressing forward with suits demanding proof that Obama is a natural born citizen prior to the certification of his election as president .
The good news is that the issue has finally broken into the mainstream media, with a blog article by David Serchuk at Forbes.
* * *
As I’ve said, though I want the facts about Obama’s birth to be brought out, I have problems with Philip Berg and I also look askance at the desperate way some Republicans, including Thomas Lifson, the editor of American Thinker, have seized on this issue.
The below was drafted by me last month but I never got around to posting it:
DRAFT October 15, 2008
It is right, necessary, and vitally urgent that the facts about Obama be brought out, as Stanley Kurtz and others have been doing. It is desperate and meretricious to parade one’s hope that that this fact about Obama, or this revelation about Obama’s associations, or this new discovery about Obama’s origins, will suddenly turn things around and make the electorate reject him. And that’s what American Thinker editor Thomas Lifson has done, by writing and posting an article about Obama with the title, “This could be the game changer.” Please. A responsible political journalist publishes the truth as he sees it, and then sees what effect it has. He doesn’t advertise an article up front as a “game-changer.” That’s public relations, not political journalism.
The article links a video by attorney and former Pennsylvania attorney general Philip J. Berg in which he argues that Obama is not a natural born U.S. citizen.
However, before watching the video, which I’ll discuss below, I already had doubts about Berg, based on previous documents he has written in this matter. In a lengthy VFR post in late August concerning Berg’s law suit to block Obama’s presidential nomination, I wrote:
Below, sent by the Editrix, from Philip Berg’s website, is his own press release describing the federal suit he has filed. However, even though he is a former Deputy Attorney General of Pennsylvania and ought to know his business, I must say that my first impression from reading through the document is that it is written in a careless, overheated, and tendentious manner (including several gratuitous spelling errors) not appropriate to a federal lawsuit. For example, Berg writes:
All the efforts of supporters of legitimate citizens were for nothing because this man lied and cheated his way into a fraudulent candidacy and cheated legitimately eligible natural born citizens from competing in a fair process and the supporters of their citizen choice for the nomination…. This relief is predicated upon one of the most basic premises of practicing law which states no lawyer can allow themselves to be used in furthering a criminal enterprise.
The use of the phrase, “criminal enterprise,” when Berg has not shown any criminal enterprise, and all that’s really needed to be demonstrated is that Obama is not a natural-born citizen, suggests someone writing under the influence of strong emotion rather than someone presenting a strong legal case.
Further, Berg makes an obvious error that makes me question whether he knows what he is talking about. Early in the document, he says that the problem is that Obama “[i]s not a naturalized citizen.” But of course, whether a person is a naturalized citizen or not is besides the point. A person must be a natural-born citizen to be eligible for the presidency. A person can be born elsewhere, and then become naturalized, but is still not eligible for the presidency because he must be a natural-born citizen, not merely a naturalized citizen. The way Berg’s document is worded raises the question whether he understands this distinction. Again, I realize this is an odd thing for me to say given Berg’s legal background, but I am responding to what he has written, not to his credentials.
[end of excerpt from August VFR entry]
Amazingly, even Lifson concedes that Berg may be a “kook.” Yet he parades Berg’s video as the most important and urgent development in the campaign.
In the video, which consists entirely of Berg speaking and explaining his case, he makes the same kind of over-the top statements that should make any prudent person question his intellectual reliability. For example, he says at the outset, that if Obama doesn’t produce his birth certificate, “he should be arrested, tried, and deported.” Such language immediately pegs Berg as a hot head, not someone I’m going to trust on a complex factual issue. And, as I said in the VFR post in August, I don’t care if Berg is a former attorney general of his state. I judge someone by his words and acts, not by a list of titles on his resume. Berg has every right to make his case, but for him to do so while using such intemperate language marks him as untrustworthy or at least as highly questionable.
Further, Berg bases his case that Obama was born in Kenya on two facts: Obama’s paternal grandmother has apparently said he was born in Kenya, and Obama’s sister and Obama have named different hospitals in Hawaii as the hospital where he was born. Thus on the hearsay of an elderly African woman, plus the easily understood contradiction about the birth hospital in Hawaii, Berg states conclusively that Obama was not born in Hawaii.
Again, this is not the mark of a responsible attorney building a case, but of a hothead.
Finally, Berg blames the Democratic National Committee for not responding to his suit and his demand for documents from Obama, but, as I’ve discussed before, Berg’s suit was filed just before the Democratic convention.
On August 24 I sent Berg this e-mail:
——Original Message——-
From: Lawrence Auster
To: philjberg@gmail.com
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 11:33.p.m.
Subject: Question about your suit re Obama
Philip Berg, Esq.
Dear Mr. Berg,
The other day I posted quite a bit at my site about your federal suit concerning Obama’s eligibility for the presidency.
One question, if I may: Why did you wait until it was so late in the process before filing this suit? You filed it three days ago. The Democratic convention starts tomorrow. There is zero chance of a federal court at this point enjoining the Democratic party from nominating Obama.
Why didn’t you initiate this suit months ago?
Thanks for any clarification on this.
Sincerely,
Lawrence Auster
I received no reply.
[End of October 15 Draft.]
- end of initial entry -
QR writes:
I really wish this had been properly resolved before the election. Imagine if he now is discovered to be ineligible. There’ll be huge riots all over the country, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the so-called “Schwarzenegger Amendment” that was being discussed a couple of years ago got rammed through Congress to prevent a bloody civil war.
November 23
Terry Morris writes:
The bottom line on this whole messy issue is that we cannot allow Obama to be sworn into office on January 20 without first establishing satisfactorily that he is a natural born citizen of the United States, thus establishing a precedent the implications of which are horrifying. All that’s being asked of Obama is that he produce a genuine birth certificate establishing his natural born citizenship status, and thus his eligibility to serve in the highest political office in the United States, not a particularly unreasonable request. All that Obama has done in response is essentially to throw gasoline on a small fire that could have been contained and extinguished very easily were he simply to have acted in compliance with the explicit provisions of the U.S. Constitution and the eligibility requirements for the presidency. Such provisions imply the means to enforce them. Now the fire has grown to nationwide proportions, and people like Alan Keyes have filed their own suits demanding a resolution to the issue.
One thing Obama needs to learn at the outset is that he cannot simply flout the provisions of the U.S. Constitution (and all laws made in pursuance thereof) like some kind of Mexican illegal alien who cares nothing of the Constitution and the form of government it establishes just because a majority of the People elected him by popular referendum without the slightest inkling that this (potential) citizenship problem existed.
I am reminded in this president Clinton’s defiant refusal to answer specific questions posed to him by a federal grand jury investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
If Obama is a natural born citizen of the U.S. then he is eligible to serve as president, if he is not a natural born citizen then he is not, end of story. The burden of proof is on him to establish his eligibility. If he continues to refuse to prove his eligibility (whether documentary proof exists or not) then he has effectively declared himself ineligible, not to mention unfit, for the presidency.
November 24
Michael A. writes:
While this is not the issue I would have chosen to prove Obama’s disqualification for the Presidency, the fact that this issue simply could have been settled early on by the release of the real birth certificate, yet was not, leads me to wonder:
What if the reluctance of the Obama campaign to release the birth certificate is due to his birth name listed as “Dunham,” his mother’s maiden name?
Note that I have absolutely no idea whether his birth name is listed as “Dunham” or “Obama,” but given the curious reluctance to release the certificate, and the fact of his father’s bigamist second marriage, perhaps this speculation may be closer to the truth that the wild & complicated conspiracy theories thrown about by conservatives.
If this be true, then Obama, in addition to his many other “firsts,” would be the first illegitimate President!
Even though the black illegitimacy rate is now at 71 percent, virtually no one thinks this is a good thing.
Admitting that the first black man to be a serious contender for the presidency was born illegitimate would have stopped his candidacy dead in its tracks!
LA replies:
No. His parents were married in February or March 1961 and he was born in August. As far as anyone in America knew at the time, the marriage was a legal marriage and he was born legitimate. The name on the birth certificate would be Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. No knew that Barack Sr. had a wife back in Africa.
The upshot is that Obama because of the probable bigamy (not because of lack of marriage and lack of father’s name on birth certificate) probably is illegitimate, and you’re right, his illegitimacy (caused by bigamy, not by the complete absence of a marriage) has not been explored at all, and it certainly would have had some impact on the election.
But a further amazing irony is that if he is illegitimate, then the attack on his natural born citizenship status is invalidated, because the law at that time made it easier for the foreign-born child of an American citizen to be certified as natural-born if the child was illegitimate than if he was legitimate. It’s bizarre that it was this way, but apparently it was; the issue is discussed in my August 2008 article on this subject that I link in the present entry. And this is one of the reasons I don’t think these challenges will get anywhere; there too many challenges and either cancel each other out or just overload the mind. If it is proved that he was not born in Hawaii, which would render him not natural born, it will probably also be proved that he was illegitimate, which would reinstate his natural-born status.
Randy writes:
Terry Morris wrote:
One thing Obama needs to learn at the outset is that he cannot simply flout the provisions of the U.S. Constitution (and all laws made in pursuance thereof) like some kind of Mexican illegal alien who cares nothing of the Constitution and the form of government it establishes just because a majority of the People elected him by popular referendum without the slightest inkling that this (potential) citizenship problem existed.
Ignoring the law when it is inconvenient is common-place these days. Bush hasn’t been the least bit concerned about the breaking of immigration laws (and all the other associated law breaking that goes with it). After all, he said the illegals just want to feed their families like every other American. So that makes it OK. You see, the immigration laws are just a minor nuisance. The technicality concerning Obama’s birth is small potatoes considering the damage that has been done by Bush and the neocons flouting the laws.
Terry Morris writes:
Randy wrote:
The technicality concerning Obama’s birth is small potatoes considering the damage that has been done by Bush and the neocons flouting the laws.
Okay, be that as it may, this is not about Bush or the Neocons. This is about Hussein O. & Co. and their flouting of the explicit provisions of Article II, section I, U.S. Constitution and all laws made in pursuance thereof prior to his actually taking office. Did Bush do anything of the sort? I realize that the hardcore conservatives out there have a bone-or-a-gazillion to pick with Bush and the neocons, but really, what has that to do with Obama’s refusal to produce something as simple and easy to produce as an authentic birth certificate establishing his natural born citizenship status?
What is Randy trying to say?, that until Bush pays for his crimes no “small potatoes” (by comparison to Bush) flouting of the provisions of the U.S. Constitution by Hussein O. & Co. may be legitimately identified? I don’t get it.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 22, 2008 01:20 PM | Send