These
days I spend a lot more time thinking or reading about politics in the US than
I probably should, and certainly more than I used to. It’s become an obsession (benign,
I hope) that was born when Barack Obama was elected president. No doubt, a few
million Americans on either side of the political divide could say
the same, so groundbreaking was Obama's election.
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| A Birther trying to make a point. Photo: Bonzo McGrue |
That
didn’t happen, though. The total and strident opposition from the right, in the
form of the Tea Party, turned the political scene into a slow-motion train
wreck that I couldn’t turn away from.
I
see the Tea Party as mostly older, mostly white, sometimes illogical folks lashing
out over the fact that things aren’t what they used to be, that the US got hit
with a gigantic financial crisis, and that – Heaven Forbid! – the Democrats
won an election. (It has to be said that for some, though I hope not most,
it is also all about the color of Barack Obama’s skin.)
As
fanatical (or fanciful) as the Tea Party sometimes can be, there’s a subset that’s
even fringier – the Birthers. These are the folks who believe (or pretend to
believe) that Barack Obama is not eligible to be president because, as they
claim, he was born in Kenya and therefore is not a “natural born” US citizen, as
required by the Constitution.
I
personally know many people back in Georgia who could be characterized as Tea
Party supporters. I hope none of them is also a serious Birther.
For
Birthers, it’s not enough that Obama is an American by right of being born to at
least one American parent (in his case, his mother). In the astute legal opinion of your
average Birther, laboring away over a keyboard in a doublewide somewhere in the
wilds of West Virginia, Obama would also have to be born on US soil to be
“natural born”. American soil!
Despite
the fact that all evidence points to Obama being born in Hawaii barely three
years after that state joined the Union, hard-core Birthers refuse to believe
it.
For
this reason, most Birthers seem delusional (meaning there really is something
wrong with them), or else they are cynical pranksters trying to egg on those others who are delusion.
The
worst offender, in my mind, is Donald Trump, who made the Birther issue the
linchpin of his so-called presidential campaign. He supposedly went so far as
to send a crack team of special investigators to Honolulu on a loudly
publicized, but insubstantial, wild goose chase to uncover the “truth” behind
Obama’s origins.
I’m
sure Trump never really believed the Birther nonsense (he’s not that stupid),
but he was happy to stoke the conspiracy flames for his own self-promotional,
giving the movement a sheen (very oily sheen?) of respectability. Because of
this, my opinion of the man went from him being mildly ridiculous and obnoxious
to being outright despicable.
(Ask
my wife how I feel about Trump. She has seen me practically leap over the sofa trying to
find the off switch on the remote whenever his face appears on TV. Following the
Birther business, I cannot stand the sight of the man.)
Most
Birthers, however, are true believers convinced that Americans born on foreign
soil (and, for them, that means Obama) cannot rightfully be president. So,
imagine my glee when, a few weeks ago, there was an unexpected turn of events
in the Birther saga. And it came from deep in the heart of Tea Party country.
A rising star in the Republican Party is Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas and a conservative with impeccable Tea Party credentials.
Cruz
is smart. He graduated Harvard Law School – just like Barack Obama. And he’s
ambitious. There’s already talk of him running for president in 2016, even
though he’s only a one-term Senator – just like Barack Obama. He has an
American mother and non-US father – just like Barack Obama. And he was born on
foreign soil – just like Barack, wait, no, not
like Barack Obama.
Unlike
Obama, Cruz is the real deal. He actually was born abroad, in Canada, a fact
that people only seemed to realize recently, after months of him generating White House
buzz among the Tea Party faithful. Mon Dieu!
To quote an old Cheech and Chong routine: “You are Canadien, not you are?”
I
love this. A charismatic conservative firebrand, the answer to the presidential
dreams of Tea Partiers (and presumably Birthers), has the exact background that
Birthers claim disqualifies the current, much despised Commander in Chief.
The
good news (for Cruz) is that it seems most experts who don’t live in the fantasy world
of Birtherism agree that being born in Calgary doesn’t make Cruz any
less presidential material.
That would also be good news for my children, born American on the foreign soil of
Finland, if they ever aspired to run for the highest office in the land, as
long as they fulfill another constitutional requirement of living in the States
for at least 14 years. In any case, becoming POTUS is nothing I would wish on any of my loved ones.
The
bad news (for Birthers) is that the eligibility of foreign-born Cruz leaves
them with a dilemma.
They
have to either drop him faster than a disgraced Rick Perry or Herman Cain, or be
forced to admit that they were wrong. They would have to face the fact that the singular "issue" that has
outraged them over the past five years, the issue that they have worked themselves into a
tizzy over, harped on, protested against, flooded the Internet with ALL CAP
diatribes about, and even took Donald Trump seriously over, was,
in fact, from the very beginning simply bogus.
Or
they could bend logic and decide, as a supporter quoted on TV did,
that “Canada’s not really foreign soil”. Either way, I am enjoying the irony of it
all. ¶
