The Birthers have nothing to do with securing the birth status provision for any potential future president, their only interest is in proving that Obama himself is not fit to be president right now, today. Turning their mission into something more palatable might make you feel better (whoever you are), but it gives legitimacy to a patently illegitimate claim. So YES, Ms. Ruby-Sachs, YES we need to be hard on the Birthers!

Funny – I don’t recall having elected Gerald Ford. Or Lyndon Johnson. Or any of the other Presidents who gained the office through non-elective means.

Emma Ruby-Sachs, attorney and board member of the Lesbian and Gay Bar Association of Chicago (LAGBAC) suggests is laying the groundwork to allow Obama to remain president in spite of the constitutional requirements. Ruby-Sachs suggests, “Maybe then we would have to look at the archaic rule that requires every President to be born in the United States.” “We have to ask ourselves, if the birthers were successful and Obama was really born in Indonesia, or Afghanistan for that matter, would he be a worse President?”

You’ve now made the extreme right more paranoid and more determined to reveal the Manchurian Candidate.

The Nigerian prince scenario is reason enough to leave the law as is. The US hasn’t had a truly plausible leftist candidate, but there are plenty of wingnuts who will pony up the cash to find a pretty face from somewhere to advance their cause. Until these people dial back their foolishness, it’s too much of a risk to change the law. Yeah, it’s archaic, and it is discriminatory against people who identify as American but happen to have been born elsewhere, but we’re stuck with a segment of the population who won’t be stopped in their delusional racist cause. If people would start calling these freaks out–the birthers, the Sarah Palins, the tax “protesters”, and all the rest–then sure, we could look at changing the law. But not until then. I’m not prepared to give another weapon to a bunch of malcontents who seem to be best described as angry white people with a huge sense of entitlement, people who’ll do anything to anybody (including selling out their country) to preserve their relative advantage. Then again, maybe their paranoia would only get worse if a Chinese or Indian immigrant became President…bwahahahaha…

I have mixed feelings about the rule myself and perhaps there ought to be some method of fine-tuning it so that, for example, a person would qualify to run for president provided that they’d become a citizen by a certain age, or that they’d lived in the US for their entire adult life, or some such thing.

A few years ago, when Republicans dominated Congress, there was some agitation among them for changing the rule just so that Schwartzenegger could run for president; fortunately that never went anywhere. It’s not that I have so much against the guy as a person; I may not agree with him on much but in the absence of the current law I don’t doubt he’d less qualified to run for president than many other people who were born and raised here. For example, compared to Sarah Palin the man’s an intellectual giant and is downright sane. It would frost me, though, to see the law changed simply in order that a specific individual could benefit from it. If we’re going to do away with the requirement then why not make it effective at some specific future date so that there won’t be a possibility that law has changed simply to favor some individual, regardless of their merit.

As far as the birthers are concerned though, I don’t see any reason to cut them slack; they’re simply pissed that someone “different from themselves” has gotten elected; remove the substance of their current objection and they’d simply find a new one.

For the person comparing it to a man leading a feminist movement, the situations are nothing like each other. Gender, for those identifying solidly as male or female, tends to be fairly fixed, even if people don’t identify with their birth-assigned gender. Being born in America doesn’t make you emotionally American, just legally, similarly, my father who immigrated when he was 3 has no memories or loyalties to anywhere else, and is surely an American. He grew up in our school systems, singing our songs, etc. It seems silly to say that he’s not an American because he spent the first 3 years of his life in Norway.

You are giving currency to the Russian/Israeli wingnut who keeps filing court cases with obviously bogus documentation, which is why she got thrown out of court.

There is no need for a discussion of the birth requirement for the Presidency as there is no one serving, running, or contemplating running who was not born in the US (Schwartzenegger notwithstanding .

The bottom line: you serve that daffy woman’s agenda by even treating her idiocy with seriousness.

Slow news day?