Obama: Who Is He, Really?

This just in—Obama not “native born,” birth certificate a forgery! You can almost hear the wingnuttery salivate over a story that seems to tailor-made for the right-wing noise machine. Oddly enough, so far it doesn’t seem to be getting much traction. Apparently it has been around for close to a month now, and even the good folks at the NRO Corner, who have scarcely ever met a Democratic character assassination they couldn’t warm to, appear to be keeping their distance.

I have nothing independent to contribute by way of evidence here and for all I know, they will come up with cast-iron proof that Obama was in factc hatched out of the devil’s backside, but I must remark on how venerable the strategy is here, going right back to, at least, the literacy laws of the Jim Crow south. That is: for any target class, erect a presumption of invalidity. Then erect a standard of proof that he applicant has to leap over before he can achieve legitimacy—and if there is any risk he might get over it, erect another, higher than the first.

In this wise, if the “forged certificate” story does indeed crash and burn, I have a suggestion for the next move—admit that the birth certificate is valid, but assert that it isn’t his—that he is an interloper who claimed his identity from God knows who.

I don’t think this is as frivolous as it sounds. A couple of years ago when I got set to apply for Social Security, I fired off a letter to the Bureau of Vital Records in Concord, NH, asking that they send me a copy of my birth certificate.

And here it is: a “Certificate of Vital Record,” signed by some guy whose name may be Quinn—rather, a copy, attested by a registrar whose name may be Bolton, and with an embossed seal. Ha! At least they fell for it at SSA! But the point is: BOLTON DOESN’T KNOW ME FROM THE MAN IN THE MOON. I’m just some guy with a postage stamp. For aught that appears here, I could have asked for the birth certificate of Senator John Sununu and got the same sort of result.

But of course the plot thickens. Assuming that I believe I am, indeed, who I say I am—how do I know that what I believe is true? I have only the word of my mother, who, to tell you the truth, was a bit of a fabulist herself. Or, remember Mark Twain: how he and his twin brother were in the bath onee night, and one of them drowned, and no one has ever known which one.

In other words, the wingnuttery should take heart. There are all kinds of reasons why Obama may be an avatar of satan, and the mere fact of a valid birth certificate ought to be of no relevance to the discussion.

Oh, and there’s always this.