Presidential Birth Certificates: Modern-Day ‘Freedom Papers’?

For those of you who are unaware, the ‘Birthers’ movement is a pejorative term (like the 9/11 Truthers) used by the many in American media to ridicule those right-wing polemicists who believe that President Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate is a ‘fake’ and because they believe that he was ostensibly born in Kenya, not the United States, he was never eligible to be president in the first place.

Seriously, all of the people in the ‘birther’ movement need to get a life (and a clue). They need to get out of their mothers’ basements in their tighty-whities and open the front door to inhale some fresh air and a much-needed dose of reality.

Sadly, certain right-wing media commentators, including high-profile polemicists like Alan Keyes, Liz Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs have all at one point or another doubted the veracity of President Obama’s ‘natural-born’ American citizen status to further their own myopic right-wing agenda and help to distract from the pressing American issues of health care reform, two ongoing wars in the Middle East and a recession that rivals only the Great Depression in its scope and breadth.

President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii at 7:24pm on August 4, 1961. According to FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, the Obama presidential campaign released a digitally-scanned image of his birth certificate in June 2008 to quell the rumors that President Obama was not a natural-born American citizen (a legal requirement for becoming President under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 5 of the United States Constitution).

Unfortunately, that proof was not enough for members of the Birther movement. They would go onto claim erroneously that either the birth certificate ’seal’ was missing, there was no signature block on the document or there was no certificate number on the document to help spread their nefarious rumors throughout the blogosphere and Internet.

To debunk their ridiculous assertions, as found by FactCheck.org, here is a photograph of the raised seal from the original birth certificate.

Secondly, here is the signature block from the Obama birth certificate. Finally, here is the un-redacted certificate number from the Barack Obama birth certificate.

For any reasonable (and slightly objective) observer out there, the controversy should have ended right here.

Nonetheless, this faux controversy does not end there. Just a few days after an angry protester, waving a birth certificate, confronted Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) over President Obama’s origins, California Rep. John Campbell (R-CA) took to MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews to promote his congressional bill requiring presidential candidates to submit copies of their birth certificates.

According to Politico, it did not take long for the interview to turn to questions about whether Campbell believed Obama himself was American-born.

“What is going on that so many Americans doubt the obvious, that Barack Obama is a citizen, to the point that you felt it necessary to co-sponsor this crazy proposal?” MSNBC host Chris Matthews asked Campbell.

That wasn’t enough for Matthews, who pressed on — and accused Campbell of trying to appease “the nutcases” while holding up a copy of Obama’s birth certificate.

Luckily, even some conservative commentators have taken the Birthers to task for the lunatic scope of their conspiracy theories. MSNBC Morning Joe host (and former Republican Congressman) Joe Scarborough described those who ascribe to this belief as “cartoon characters” who “would rather, instead of trying to actually figure out what’s happening to their country — the terrible things that are happening economically to their country — they embrace conspiracy theories.”

Scarborough further marveled that it was “not enough for these people” that Obama’s “has been shown” as well as a birth announcement for Obama in the Honolulu Advertiser, on the day Barack Obama was born 47 years ago.” Scarborough also compared birth certificate conspiracy theorists to people who believe “the United States government blew up its own buildings and killed its own people on September 11th” and believe that we “never landed on the moon.”

Even our resident hatemonger-in-chief Rush Limbaugh has taken to his bully-pulpit airwaves to duplicitously claim on July 21, 2009 that “Barack Obama has yet to have to prove that he’s a citizen”

These are the same knuckleheads who started national whisper smear campaigns claiming that President Obama was some sort of crypto-Muslim manchurian candidate during the 2008 presidential election.

Something else for the Birthers to keep in mind: It is also an historical fact that Senator John McCain was NOT born in the United States.

John Sidney McCain III was born on August 29, 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone where his mother and father, a Navy officer, were stationed.

If the Birther movement is not a racially-motivated fringe group of right-wing nutjobs, then it would be a logical conclusion that they would express the same dubious citizenship outrage if Senator McCain had won the 2008 presidential election.

Which brings me to my final (rhetorical) question: If the ‘white guy’ had won the 2008 presidential elections, would we have ever heard a bloody peep from the Birther’s movement?

Yeah…I didn’t think so…

That is what makes our current American ‘debate’ over presidential birth certificates the moral equivalent of modern-day ‘freedom papers’ because of a black man named Barack Obama who happens to be our naturally-born American president.