Topic: WorldNetDaily
Months ago, back when Ted Cruz was still running for president, WorldNetDaily couldn't run fast enough from questions about Cruz's eligibility to be president despite the fact that, by WND's own definition, Cruz was even more ineligible than it claimed President Obama was.
Nnow, all of a sudden -- months after Cruz stopped running for president and his eligibility is off the table for at least the next four years -- WND is expressing an opinion about Cruz's eligibility.
As does a lot of things at WND right now, it comes in the context of the stolen WikiLeaks emails. In an Oct. 16 article, an anonymous WND writer speculates about a proposed Democratic plan during the primary to declare that it would not challenge Cruz's eligibility:
But, was that the real story – or the whole story?
No, it wasn’t. Had the Democrats challenged Cruz on eligibility, it would have been tantamount to challenging Obama. Both had one American citizen parent – in both cases, their mothers. But, given the age of Obama’s teen-age mother at the time, there were legal questions raised, whereas Cruz’s mother had long been established as an American citizen. It would have been a tough case to make against Cruz given the ridicule the Dems piled on all those who challenged Obama’s constitutional eligibility.
Astute birther scholars will notice that this anonymous WND writer repeats an irrelevant claim and also moves the birther goalposts.
The statement that "there were legal questions raised" because of the age of Obama's mother at the time of his birth is true -- but it leaves out the fact that this clause only applies if the child was born outside the United States. Since Obama was born in Hawaii, and WND has not proven otherwise, it doesn't matter how old his mother is -- Obama is a citizen.
WND's current insistence that Cruz is a citizen because his mother "had long been established as an American citizen" is a change in position from the one it has long promoted: that both parents must be citizens in order to confer citizenship on the child.
Of course, WND doesn't explain the reason it wouldn't address Cruz's eligibility at that time: because Joseph Farah, Jerome Corsi and crew knew that if they defended Cruz -- since, again, he was even more ineligible than Obama since, unlike Obama, he was born outside the U.S. -- they would also have to prove Obama was eligible as well. That refusal simply proved that WND's obsession with Obama's eligibility was never about the Constitution and always about trying to personally destroy Obama.
So, it apparently took six-plus months for WND to figure out a defense of Cruz's eligibility that managed to also keep Obama's eligibilitiy in question -- and it's still dishonest. That's just another reason nobody believes WND.
