Topic: WorldNetDaily
Even when its beloved birther buddy Donald Trump forces the issue, WorldNetDaily would still rather not talk about Ted Cruz's eligibility for the presidency -- something WND has been studiously avoiding because applying the same standards to Cruz that it did to Barack Obama would render Cruz even more uneligible to be president than WND insists Obama is.
But WND couldn't not report Trump's birther outburst. So it fell to Douglas Ernst to do damage control. In his Jan. 5 article, Ernst concedes that "Republican front-runner Donald Trump has officially gone into birther territory on Texas Sen. Ted Cruz," then sought to quickly dismiss any whiff of controversy:
Cruz’s mother was a U.S. citizen when he was born in Calgary in 1970, but his father had been born in Cuba. Legal scholars say it is likely Cruz would pass the U.S. Constitution’s “natural-born citizen” litmus test if the issue ever landed him in court.
But Ernst fails to mention that WND's preferred (albeit never supported in any relevant court ruling) definition of "natural-born citizen" when applied to Obama -- that both parents must be U.S. citizens -- would also render Cruz ineligible.
Note also how Ernst skips around the issue by failing to explicitly state that Cruz's father, Rafael Cruz, was not a U.S. citizen at the time Cruz was born -- he didn't become one until 2005. Ernst also fails to disclose the relevant conflict of interest that his employer is also the publisher of the new book by Rafael Cruz.
But that's only half of Ernst's article. He spends the rest of it rehashing Obama birther stuff, again taking care not to mention that most of what he claims has been discredited, or that "the only official law-enforcement review of Obama’s documentation, done by Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona," is widely considered to be a joke.
Ernst has done his best nothing-to-see-here act. But every thing WND does this, the disparity in its birther treatment of Obama and Cruz becomes more glaring.
