Topic: WorldNetDaily
Diana West begins her April 4 WorldNetDaily column this way:
Get ready for the last straw.
First, though, I’d like to suggest that anyone reading this column in a local newspaper or news site pat the editor on the back for publishing what in our neo-medieval world of fear amounts to a “forbidden” column.Yup, I am about to say something about the Great Barack Obama Identity/Eligibility Scandal again.
Well, no. We know West loves to play the victim when publications refuse to publish her increasingly fringe, far-right views. What she's writing isn't "forbidden"; it simply proves that West is willing to ignore all logical evidence in order to cling to her birther conspiracy theory.
West continues:
I know that this is one rich and urgent topic that doesn’t see the light of day in certain so-called news outlets – and I say that from the experience of watching my own syndicated columns fail to appear when covering news of the White House press conference where the president’s long-form birth certificate was unveiled, news of courtroom proceedings in various states on Obama’s ballot eligibility and news of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s investigators presenting evidence that the online Obama birth certificate is a forgery.
Actually, the Arpaio cold case posse has been discredited. Not that anyone would know that by reading WND, since WND writer Jerome Corsi was/is a de facto member of the posse and has plenty of motive to keep up the illusion of credibility. Also, pretty much every birther lawsuit has been laughed out of court, and that's before the subpar lawyering of Orly Taitz and Larry Klayman is taken into consideration.
West then goes the revisionist-history route:
In fact, the whereabouts of Obama’s nativity is in no way the main bone of “birther” contention, despite the blinkered focus on it by the enforcers of silence. Of far greater concern to me, for starters, is the purportedly original documentation President Obama belatedly provided the American people to attest to his identity.
So has Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse out in Maricopa County, Ariz. So, too, has the Israel Science and Technology website, a national database and directory of science- and technology-related sites in Israel established by Benjamin Netanyahu’s former science adviser, molecular biologist Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.
WND's Joseph Farah tried this same bit of revisionism a few years ago, insisting that "eligibility," not nativity, was really the issue. This would be the same guy that published a supposed Kenyan birth certificate for Obama that turned out to be fraudulent.
As for the supposed expertise of "Benjamin Netanyahu’s former science adviser, molecular biologist Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.," Dr. Conspiracy sums it up: "Israel Hanukoglu is just another crank birther conspiracy theorist with no credentials in what he’s writing about. He doesn’t even pretend to employ the scientific method with experiment, nor does he cite sources with credentials any better than his."
West continues:
Having weighed the arguments, it seems to me that by virtue of having a British subject for a father, Barack Obama Jr. is constitutionally ineligible to be president of the United States, no matter where he was born.
With a British father, Obama cannot meet the constitutional requirement of having been “natural born,” which is a different and more restrictive category than “native born.”
Again, no. Most legitimate legal authorities consider "natural born" and "native born" to be interchangeable. And nowhere in the Constitution or in federal law is "natural born citizen" defined only as the child of two citizen parents.
From there, West proceeds to whining:
Aside from Alan Keyes, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and a Republican candidate for the Senate and the presidency, no prominent Republican – from John McCain to Mitt Romney to John Boehner to Ron Paul – and no prominent conservative, from William Bennett to Sarah Palin to Rudy Giuliani, ever faced or raised the issue.
Similarly, no think tank, no committee in Congress, no judicial body, no civic group and no mainstream media organization has advanced any responsible inquiry into these troubling questions.
We're glad she admits that Arpaio's cold case posse did not conduct a "responsible inquiry." Oh, wait -- you mean it's not a "civic group"? Then again, she appears to be putting noted crazy person Alan Keyes in the "responsible" category.
Finally, West unironically claims: "What chance does any free society in such deep denial have to continue?" The only person we see in deep denial about this is West. You'd think the fact that WND is her most prominent media outlet these days would serve as a clue.
