Topic: WorldNetDaily
Just how desperate is Joseph Farah to cling to his little Obama birth certificate conspiracy? He's too lazy to hunt down a simple link so his readers can judge the facts for themselves.
In his June 15 WorldNetDaily column, Farah writes:
By the way, further establishing that it was impossible for Obama to have been a "natural born citizen" are some astonishing words found on his own campaign website. They indicate that Obama was "at birth" a citizen of Kenya and a subject of Great Britain. Why did the founders insist upon a "natural born citizen" clause in the Constitution? To avoid questions of divided loyalties. (Just scroll down the webpage and read the FactCheck.org excerpt to see this amazing admission for yourself.)
That excerpt states:
“When Barack Obama Jr. was born on Aug. 4,1961, in Honolulu, Kenya was a British colony, still part of the United Kingdom’s dwindling empire. As a Kenyan native, Barack Obama Sr. was a British subject whose citizenship status was governed by The British Nationality Act of 1948. That same act governed the status of Obama Sr.‘s children.
Since Sen. Obama has neither renounced his U.S. citizenship nor sworn an oath of allegiance to Kenya, his Kenyan citizenship automatically expired on Aug. 4,1982.”
Note that it specifically states Obama held U.S. citizenship at the time he held Kenyan citizenship as a child -- something Farah fails to acknowledge, since that inconvenient fact would destroy the argument he's trying to make.
Note also that Farah doesn't bother to link to the original FactCheck article from which the excerpt was taken -- which would have destroyed Farah's argument further. At no point does it dispute the fact that Obama is, and always has been, a U.S. citizen.
Further, at no point does Farah offer evidence to prove his larger argument --that Obama holding dual citizenship as a child, or having one parent who was not an American citizen, fails to fulfill the "natural born citizen" requirement of the Constitution for presidential eligibility.
Farah also asserts that Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, "was too young to have qualified under the law for bestowing that privilege on her son, even if the father had been a citizen and even in the unlikely event Obama was actually born in Hawaii!" But that claim has been discredited. From the Tribune Co. Washington Bureau blog The Swamp:
Hawaii was a state in 1961, when Obama was born. Any person born in the U.S. automatically is a "natural born citizen," said University of California Los Angeles law professor Eugene Volokh.
Even if a person is born outside the United States, courts have ruled any child born to at least one U.S. citizen is a U.S. citizen, Volokh said. Stanley Ann Dunham would have counted even if Obama's Kenyan father did not.
If this becomes an issue in a post-election eligibility challenge, expect a likely sticking point to be the legal definition in 1961 of how parents could be called U.S. citizens for this purpose, Volokh said. At the time Obama was born, the law stated that a person would be considered a "natural born citizen" if either parent was a citizen who had lived at least 10 years in the U.S., including five years after the age of 14--in other words, 19.
Dunham was three months shy of her 19th birthday when Obama was born. But subsequent acts of Congress relaxed the requirement to five years in the U.S., including just two years after the age of 14, meaning Dunham could have been 16 and still qualified even if Obama was born in another country, Volokh said. Congress made the law retroactive to 1952, doubly covering Obama.
So add this to the fetid pile of lies Farah and the rest of WND have told about Obama.
And, of course, Farah is still refusing to acknowledge that his own website delcared that the birth certificate released by Obama's campaign is "authentic" and that a lawsuit challenging Obama's citizenship in part "relies on discredited claims."
Farah really seems to think that if he tells lies about Obama long enough and loudly enough, they might become true. Sad, isn't it?
