Palin and the "Birther" Movement (Long Post)

The following is a long post, covering the Trump-Palin birther “stuff” and takes a stab at putting the whole birther movement to bed.

I have been a fan of Sarah Palin ever since she burst on the scene during the 2008 Presidential election. She is a breath of fresh air in a very stagnant political atmosphere. Her directness and plain speak caught many off guard, and have off-put many. I love the fact that her down to earth personality really gets on the nerve of the journalistic elite who have the wrong-headed opinion that one must graduate from an east coast school to be a national level politician. It gives me great pleasure to see that she “bugs” them as much as she does.  BTW: If you know any of these people and they try to tell she doesn’t get on their nerves, your BS radar should be screaming at you at that point.  I do believe that she would do a wonderful job leading this nation. And to write her off as not being smart is doing so at a risk. Just because she didn’t graduate from an Ivy League school doesn’t mean she isn’t smart. But I also realize that Palin is not a middle of the road candidate with a Reagan-style likability. I also realize that she can be a polarizing figure, most likely not electable, even in today’s back-to-basics movement.

Her ability to beat Obama in 2012 was probably 50/50 at best. She would have to run a perfect campaign by winning the usual states, taking states that have turned democrat recently, and maybe even stealing a Washington or New Hampshire or two to beat Obama. It would be a race between an incumbent teleprompter-savvy guy heavily supported by the press and a homespun, no nonsense, plain talking upstart from Alaska.

Now she has most likely ended any realistic chances of defeat Obama. In recent weeks, Donald Trump has spun up the whole birth certificate issue during a media blitz that many portend as a possible run for the Republican nomination in 2012. Now Palin has joined him (sort of) in calling for Obama to release his official birth certificate. This is going to be a drag on her candidacy, especially when you consider that the press is squarely in his corner.  They will go to great lengths to paint her as extreme (not that they haven’t done that already).

As for my own personal opinion on where Obama was born I believe he was born in Hawaii, granting him citizenship. But I must caveat that with this thought; The alternative is just too damn scary to contemplate.  This nation needs him to be born in the USA. If we elected a man who was not born in the USA, and he and others knew this, the very foundation of our nation would be shaken. The President is the one individual we elect as a nation to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. To think there would be the possibility that as a people we could be hoodwinked by the greatest con to ever be pulled off is just too hard to imagine. It would shake our confidence so deeply, I don’t know if we would have the ability or the wherewithal to recover.

I am also firmly in the camp that there really is no way to pull off some sort of grand conspiracy from Obama’s birth. Just think about what it would take to pull this off. Somehow there had to be a group of people smart enough to know that we were going to be color-blind enough nearly five decades after he was born to elect a man who was half black. In the late 50’s (when the conspiracy would have been developed) race relations were at their worst. The nation was becoming polarized over the issue. Can anyone truly believe that back then this grand conspiracy group had the foresight to see we would be ready to elect a black man President in 2008? 

It would be hard to imagine that as much as some of the people on the left hate this country that they would stoop so low as to try to pull this off. If there was a grand conspiracy, the people involved are supposed to be far-sighted enough to have created a plan as far back as the late 1950’s. If their vision was so great then how come they couldn’t see there are only two possible outcomes of a con like this (please remember, I don’t believe this has happened, I am only giving you a scenario).

The first outcome would be the driver for this whole plan. The progressive want to tear down this country and rebuild it in their utopian image. They have been at for years but never have they had the right person at point. They probably thought Clinton was their guy, but he was too much of a politician to help the progressives realize their dreams. In Barak Obama they might think they have this person. He is a true ideologue having been raised to believe this nation is a racist, overbearing empire. But here they have already overplayed their plan. For whatever reason they can’t seem to get it through their heads the USA is a right of center nation with a very strong foundation in Judeo-Christian values who strongly believes in individual liberties, not collectivism. The backlash against Obama has already begun, ushering in the Republican majority in the House. I personally believe the only thing currently propping up Obama is his personal likability and the leftist press.  He does seem like a nice guy but so was President Bush and the press trashed him at every opportunity.

The second outcome is the complete finish of the progressive movement.  Progressivism has always been on the fringe with their ideals of a utopian society and social (not equal) justice, not to mention eugenics. But in recent years they have been able to gather enough momentum to start having an impact by taking over the democrat party (Pelosi, Waxman, Wiener). The crescendo was the election of Obama. But if word ever got out the President was not a citizen and his election had been orchestrated by some secret cabal, the progressive movement would forever be dead. There has always been a bit of uneasiness of the progressives coming from the American people, whether left or right. The right has always felt progressives have wanted to end individual liberties through policies.  The left has resented the guerrilla tactics used to overtake the liberal movement. In a nation built on individual liberties, the collectivism of the progressive movement has always been something Americans tolerated but held at arm’s length. If the scenario I have outlined happened to come true, Americans would forever distrust those tied to the progressive movement, most likely ending the movement.

My whole point is if these grand conspirators had been smart enough to groom a man from birth (likely before), then they should have been smart enough to know it would never work. So no, there is no grand conspiracy to get Obama elected President.

Another point to consider is personality. When we vote for President, we want to be able to like the person we elect. They do have to be competent, but personality counts for a lot. In Obama’s case, he was pretty much a blank slate as far as accomplishments were concerned. Sure, he had done some time as a state Senator and a little less than one year in Washington, but his list of accomplishment were pretty short (sticky-note short). Hillary Clinton and John McCain have accomplishments (some on the coattails of her husband, for Clinton), lacking in the personality department, but would have understood what it takes to be and act like a President. So what won? Obama cannot chalk up his victory because of his policy accomplishments. It was his charming personality. How could these grand conspirators know what Obama would be like as an adult? They couldn’t. If he had been as dull as Kerry or Gore, he would have never made it out of the first round in the primaries, much less become President, because of his utter lack of accomplishments.

As for the whole birth certificate issue, if Obama and his handlers had released his birth certificate when he announced his run for President, the whole issue would have died in 2007.

McCain was required to release his certificate even though there was no question regarding his citizenship (both mom and dad were US born citizens). McCain’s birth in Panama was the excuse used to get him to release the certificate. Obama’s status as a natural born citizen is more questionable. His father was NOT a US citizen and citizenship status was often determined not by location, but by the birth father. He was born in a state that was not even a year old yet and record keeping might have been a little iffy. The document he released initially was as common as toilet paper. My parents could have requested the same document by just writing the state, and I was born in Oregon (yes, I am a US citizen). His secrecy about his schooling (no thesis’ released, very little on his legal opinions, very little visibility on his school records) does him no favors either.  Couple these together and eyebrows can be raised. When you include his travels and living locations as a youth, citizenship is much more questionable than an individual born from parents who were US citizens, served in the military, and has been part of the national political scene for two plus decades.

One last point to make on this subject. For whatever reason, Obama continues to be reluctant to allow the State of Hawaii authorization to release the long form birth certificate (the official document).  He has a legal team that spends time fighting to keep the record closed.  We have only seen the short form. The short form is considered a legal document so it pretty much establishes his residency. But why the secrecy on the long form? Just release the stupid thing and be done with it.

By the way, for all you race-baiters out there who say it has to do with his race I say this; shove it. As I have pointed out in the paragraphs above, there are enough issues surrounding his birth that will cause people bring up this question.  I have no doubt that if McCain had been born to one parent who was not a US citizen and he had been as reluctant as Obama to release the original document the MSM would have been all over this.

To sum it all up, Palin did herself no favors by jumping on Trump’s bandwagon. As far as I am concerned, Obama is a US citizen and he could have cleared this up a long time ago if he had been forth-coming early on and would stop being so evasive on the matter.