Bill Maher takes on the birthers , and he doesn’t tread lightly.
[There was once a video available, but it was taken down by Youtube due to copyright violations. If anyone can find a video available at Maher’s own site, please let me know.]
Bill Maher takes on the birthers
- Post author:Erich Vieth
- Post published:August 1, 2009
- Post category:Humor / hypocrisy / ignorance / Psychology Cognition / Religion
- Post comments:51 Comments
Erich Vieth
Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.
Seems to me that there is more uncertainty about McCain's "natural-born" citizenship than Obama's. Had McCain won, where would the birthers stand on the issue?
My only statement is that McCain was either willing or at least honest enough to have his original "long form" birth cerificate analyzed.
This is certainly more than POTUS Obama was willing or honest enough to do.
Would anyone here spent over a million in lawyer fees to prevent the release of their original birth certificate?
In case you haven't seen this yet.
http://orlytaitzesq.com/obama-certified-copy-of-r…
Karl: It's not the paper that matters. I could easily create a birth certificate showing that Obama was born on the moon. The issue is whether public officials will stand behind the paper. Hawaiian offices fully stand behind the Hawaiian birth certificate. Where are the Kenyan public officials who will stand behind this (bogus) certificate? Where is a contemporaneous Kenyan newspaper announcement?
Karl, back in the 50's and 60's many states did not use a long form birth certificate. I was born near Pittsburg PA in 1959 and my birth certificate is similar to Obama's. I admit that I have had problems with people who refused to believe my birth certificate is real because Pennsylvania in 1959 used the short form as the official record.
Niklaus,
An Hawaiian official has stated they have some sort of original documentation that is the basis for the evidence for what they used to create POTUS Obama's Certification of Birth. No one has only a Certification of Birth unless the original documentation has been destroyed, or tampered with, or legally sealed for reasons of adoption or some thing similar.
The legal ramifications are such that they can not even hint as to what is on these documents for fear of violation of their own state regulations.
If there are any original public officials still alive who can be located to explain what the original documents concerning Obama's birth really mean it would be a miracle at this point.
The document from Kenya was known about last year but it was put under seal until after the election. How it is surfacing now is the question.
The US State Department should be involved in determining if the Kenyan document also has original documentation which it is based upon and public officials who stand behind it as well.
Karl: We shouldn't even be mentioning that alleged Kenyan document unless reputable Kenyan government officials are standing behind it. Anyone could have concocted that document to which you linked.
Karl
That 'Kenyan' Birth certificate has been demonstrated to be a fraud.
Kenya was still beholding to the UK when Obama was born (and the document is dated) — it did not become a republic until DECEMBER.
Mombassa (listed as the place of birth, in the document) was not even part of Kenya at that time.
The signatories are non existent (the registrar is apparentally the name of a breakfast food)
It has been documented that the so-called birth certificate was copied and modified from an Australian birth certificate (see here
Totally fake.
Why am I unsurprised that you fail at skepticism in this case, Karl?
Karl writes:—"How it is surfacing now is the question."
Because people who obsessed with this won't let it go, even after ample evidence that there's nothing to it. You are in this an aspiring Ken Starr and this is Obama's Whitewater.
Which, btw, also turned out to have nothing behind it.
This is the cultural equivalent of a UFO. Some folks are going to refuse to believe it's anything other than a LGM while the rest of us go with reality.
Karl, Name that "Hawiian Official" and his/her office.
Dr. Chiyome Fukino is the director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, has seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health which she claims verify Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen. She has made statements to this effect twice. The statement in October of 2008 was only days before the election and the one more recently in July of 2009.
If the information in these records is enough for a State official, why are so many "birthers" as they are being labelled not satisfied? Why does Obama spend millions to keep the information in these vital records from public consideration/confirmation?
McCane let his original be scrutinized without reservaton. The definition of "natural born" is most unclear and will perhaps one day reveal the very questionable nature of Obama'a entire Presidency.
“If Fukino has a secret ‘original file’ which she repeatedly references and examines, she makes the president look more and more like he's either embarrassed or simply unwilling to trust anyone other than himself with the full implications of what is on these documents.
Could they be forgeries as well? Or if not forgeries could they be contrived by close family and associates that could easily point to errors or mistakes in how the matter was processed?
The only way to verify any original in this matter is to have sworn affidavits or signatures of two (preferrably unrelated) people from those who where present and witnessed the events being confirmed. Anything else is not worth the paper it is written on.
Hawaii has one form of their birth vital records that doesn't require anyone other than a single relative to sign on the dotted line. This is what many Americans find troubling and why they want to see how verifiably legal our POTUS really is.
If originals exist in Kenya and also in Hawaii, I'd trust the one that has an unrelated doctor or nurse practitioner as one of the signatures.
Karl: On what do you base your claim that Obama is spending any money at all regarding his birth certificate? Everything I've see makes it clear that this is an issue of Hawaiian state law, and that the Hawaiian state officials have produced records clearly showing that Obama was born in Hawaii. The issue is as clear as the fact that natural selection drives the evolution of species. Ooops. Bad comparison when trying to discuss things with Karl.
Karl writes:—"If the information in these records is enough for a State official, why are so many “birthers” as they are being labelled not satisfied? Why does Obama spend millions to keep the information in these vital records from public consideration/confirmation?"
Come on, Karl, is this really a mystery? There is a certain mentality that is obsessive about things it perceives as "state secret" type mysteries. It is this mindset that keeps UFOlogists looking for little green men, Shroudests continually asserting that the physics are all wrong in every demonstration that the Shroud of Turin is a fake, that there was another shooter in Dallas (on the grassy knoll), that FDR "knew" the Japanese were going to bomb Pearl Harbor…
The list goes on. Proof has the effect of reinforcing these folks' conviction that something is wrong, something is not being revealed, something is being covered up. It's a game gone awry, it's a What If conundrum that has taken on a life of its own. You can never prove this issue to them sufficiently because they've established it as an a priori fact that every attempt to prove the opposite of what they believe is evidence of a cover up.
Do you really not recognize this for what it is?
(On a less critical note, it is the same as those folks who believe Shakespeare was a pseudonym for Someone Else, that those plays could not have been done by a "mere playwright." It's all nonsense, but there's no convincing them.)
Right near the top of the list for Obama's first day in office was signing executive order 13489.
The order in effect tells the American people they can only know what he want them to know about him, especially what any official governmental and archival documentation concerning him says.
If "anything" is released without passsing throught the approval of the POTUS they are in violation of the executive order.
A governemtal agency such as the Hawaii State department of health would need to risk violation of this order to even release what the vital records really say about Obama. The matter is sealed period. This is why some people will never believe Obama on any number of levels.
Someone who even has anything archival about Obama in could get arrested if they put it out for the general public, especially if it is possibly true but unsubtantiated.
Come on, what kind of openness and transparency is this?
http://current.com/items/90468136_obama-signs-exe…
http://www.infowars.com/obama-signs-executive-ord…
Karl: Put one of your fingers in one of your ears and consider this: The Hawaiian officials have made it clear that there is no controversy here. Obama was born in Hawaii. Records that do exist are official records and they clearly indicate this.
Karl,
Where was John McCain born?
I am one who holds the opinion that a single person did not write every single play which has been attributed to Bill Shakespeare.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorsh…
Ben,
Being a writer myself, I find this notion offensive. What it is is delegitimization of talent. It's a denial of agency. This is something women writers have complained about for centuries. It suggests that none of us actually can do what we do, because the requirements of the task are too complex. By extension, you have to say that Charles Dickens could not have written all that he did, nor could Zola or Balzac, nor could Michener, and certainly not King. When you extend the argument to other writers you begin to see the problem.
But everyone has to have a hobby, I suppose.
Karl, you should read the Presidential records act. It only applies to documents created by the President, Vice President or their staff during their time in office and definitely would not apply to his birth certificate, which is a public record created long before he got into politics.
Karl,
Eight-and-a-half years ago, slightly over half the American voting public was faced with what they perceived as an undesirable, unqualified President, put into place in what they perceived as an illegitimate election. Their protestations were answered with, "The election has been certified. The results are final. There is nothing that you can do about it. Get over it. See you in four years."
Now the situation is reversed. A somewhat smaller portion of the American voting public is faced with what they perceive as an undesirable, unqualified President, put into place in what they perceive as an illegitimate election.
The election has been certified.
The results are final.
There is nothing that you can do about it.
Get over it.
See you in four years.
Karl,
W sealed all the records going back to the time of Reagan's election clearly to keep those documents which would have clarified his father's role in Iran-Contra from becoming public. There were a few cries of foul, but W was "popular" and these were shouted down, mostly by the people now demanding "full disclosure" from Obama—the irony is manifest.
How come you ain't bitchin' about that? You want to talk about really inappropriate actions…
Mark, Niklaus, Erich: Don't confuse Karl with facts — that can only increase his cognitive dissonance, and he's reality challenged enough as it is.
Karl knows what he knows, and no librul facts are gonna change that.
Three different hospitals have all been identified in one way or another as Obama's birth place.
It has been shown that there are problems with the address in Hawaii given as where someone connected with him by the newspaper announcement was suppose to have lived.
His Sister who definitly was not born in Hawaii also has a Hawaian COLB.
If Obama received financial aid from sources nobody cares to ask about it. If any were recieved under the guise as "foreign student" aid the man considered himself a dual citizen of the country that granted the financial assistance, or else he as an "American" duped these other nations who also believed he was a citizen of their nation.
Karl: Before you decide to believe something, you need to decide whether it's credible.
Ben and Mark,
Bill Bryson wrote a wonderful book called Shakespeare: The World as Stage, in which he reviews all that we know about William Shakespeare (which isn't much). Along the way, he pretty much demolishes the claims of the Shakespearean authorship doubters.
Erich: Karl has already demonstrated his inability to discern 'credible' versus 'in-credible'.
Karl: please do keep posting – you provide me with hours of amusement.
And how does one decide a matter if there is conflicting information and no one is offering the vital details of the matter?
Why must the half brother of BHO Jr. be told he must wait a full year to get an original copy of some sort of a birth certificate for his father's American son?
Why is there a UN official stating that they are running out of time (a one year time frame) to get the changes that they want to see accomplished?
I can believe the following:
That Hawaii has laws that enabled a child born in Mombasa, Africa to a British subject father and a American citizen mother who conceived him (around the date of her eighteenth birthday) while in her first semester enrolled in a college in Hawaii to be allowed to register the birth in Hawaii, making him officially a legal resident of Hawaii, and in the minds of the state of Hawaii legal system, a natural born citizen.
I do not believe this conveys to such a child a right to natural born citizenship in the United States, unless the state codes followed either meet or supersede any national codes concerning citizenship in effect as of the date of the birth.
There were national codes in effect at the time in 1961. Hawaii codes evidently did not match the national codes which state that a mother of the age of Stanley could not pass along her citizenship to her son. This would make only the British citizenship valid in the case of BHO Jr. This is why he does not want the matter to be brought to light.
In my mind the easiest way to confer natural born citizenship means both parents are legal citizens who wish to convey the same citizenship to their child. Where the birth took place in these regards refers to being native born as opposed to natural born. Being native born is not the same as being natural born. John McCain was native born in Panama, but his parents were both natural citizens of the USA who both had the ability and desire to pass that heritage on to their son.
BHO Sr. did not have the ability to pass on to BHO Jr. the ability to be a natural born American Citizen, only at best a native born status if the birth did indeed occur in Hawaii.
A naturalized citizen is one who wishes to be a citizen and the nation they are in officially approves and validates this through a legal process. Naturalized citizens can not serve as President of the USA.
Children born to illegal aliens are native born in America, this does not make anyone of them natural born citizens just because their parents gave birth to them while in America. The birth a child to parents with mixed citizenship gives the child citizenship status that is unclear. Such children should only be capable of becoming citizens of the country here they happen to reside through an official legal naturalization process.
In the case of BHO Jr. and cases like his, something besides the filing of registrations of birth documents must be considered to determine the actual citizenship(s) of the child at time of birth. If both a British registration and a Hawaii registration exist the courts alone can decide the status of natural born citizenship.
The question comes down to whether or not Stanley Ann Durham (Obama) alone had the ability in 1961 to pass along natural born citizenship to her son, providing him with a full dual citizenship.
This is what several of the law suits have been about.
If the marriage was legal or illegal, BHO Jr. was legally a British subject if BHO Sr. was indeed his father. Whether or not BHO Sr. registered his son's birth in a hospital under British regulation, BHO Jr. would be considered to have an unclear or dual citizenship no matter where the birth was officially registered.
People have not seen either the vital records concerning the birth of Obama or the marriage certificate of his parents. Records of the divorce decree from Hawaii appear to be available which tends to make one figure that Obama was conceived while Stanley Ann Durham was a freshman at University of Hawaii at Mānoa and before the marriage on February 3, 1961 as he was born on August 4, 1961. She was around three months pregnant at the marriage. She appears to have gone to Africa to visit here husbands' family where she found she had been lied to by BHO Sr. and that he was still married to his first wife from Kenya.
Before returning to the US that summer the birth occurred in what would become the nation of Kenya.
The Hawaiian requirements for registering the birth allowed for Stanley Ann Durham (Obama) or someone on her behalf to file the birth registration in Hawaii.
By the legal code of Hawaii, if the birth was not witnessed and processed by medical officials from Hawaii, someone would have needed to stipulate that they had been residents of Hawaii and wished to declare this to be the birth of a child who they legally wanted to have the birth rights of a Hawaiian.
This is also a factor-
Under the immigration laws in effect when President Elect Obama was born, a child of a US citizen (his mother) and a non-citizen (his father), had to either be born in the US or live for five consecutive years in the US to keep his citizenship. Since she took him to Indonesia when he was age four, whether he was a citizen or not all depends upon where he was really born.
This is what my uncertainty and the questions are all centered upon.
Did Stanley Ann Durham(Obama) have the ability to convey United States Citizenship to her son?
Yes, if he really was born in Hawaii.
No, if the birth took place in Kenyan because he left the country at the age of four.
Other issues?
Was the marriage even a legal one or must it be annulled according to the laws of Hawaii?
Do the codes for Hawaiian citizenship run parallel to the rest of the USA or does each state have the ability to declare by their particular interpretation of the documentation who is or is not a natural citizenship in particular?
Can any specific state make a legal resolution that can declare specific individuals to be "natural born"?
Can any group of people decide what the definition of "natural born" means to them even if others don't agree?
Can a legislature of any type declare an individual to be natural born, or must all three branches of the US government agree for this type of a declaration to be made?
For example could CA declare Arnold to be a "natural born citizen" and thus enable him to run for the presidency?
Can Hawaii thumb its nose at national immigration code to protect its interpretation of natural born citizenship?
Can an answer to the question be obtained without the information required to make the determination?
The answer is not obtainable because people do not want to clarify the situation.
I would be convinced of Obama's citizenship if he were honest enough to give the details of exactly what the vital information is that he does not wish to reveal.
Karl: Take this same level of hyper skepticism that you are displaying regarding Obama's birthplace and apply it to whether Jesus existed, or whether Jesus walked on water, or whether Jesus was divine. If you would be willing to be this skeptical regarding religious articles of faith, you'd be an atheist.
In fact, if you were birther-skeptical as a general rule, you would doubt your own existence. You'd doubt that your shadow was your shadow.
You seem to have a big switch that you periodically flip. In the up position you believe anything and in the down position you believe nothing at all.
How do you know where you were born? Why would you have the audacity to trust the accounts of family and friends? Why would have be so naive to trust your own birth certificate. Maybe it was forged.
Stacy,
PBS has recently aired Michael Woods' "In Search of Shakespeare", which is marvelously well researched (only to be expected from Mr. Woods) and shows that we know far more about Bill than we thought (though, as you point out, still not much), but also that there's enough of a "paper trail" to establish both single authorship and that Shakespeare was actually Shakespeare.
But as I said above, everyone has to have a hobby.
Karl writes:—"BHO Sr. did not have the ability to pass on to BHO Jr. the ability to be a natural born American Citizen, only at best a native born status if the birth did indeed occur in Hawaii."
No, but his mother did.
Karl, consider the possibility that all this information is stuff that has been answered but no one among those you're listening to gives a shit about those answers.
And further, it may be possible that all this is a misrepresentation. It's not like folks like this have never lied before!
—"Did Stanley Ann Durham(Obama) have the ability to convey United States Citizenship to her son?
Yes, if he really was born in Hawaii.
No, if the birth took place in Kenyan because he left the country at the age of four."
Wrong. You figure it out. You have a filter, however, that won't allow this. Your mischaracterization of executive order concerning presidential records proves that.
And lastly, why the fuss? I'm sure you were loudly condemning the 2000 election as a miscarriage of electoral process, weren't you? Or were you? Or were you simply pleased a rightwing asshole got elected, NO MATTER HOW, and thought those who were challenging its legality were just sore losers and pishers?
I reiterate, if there was something wrong with Obama's citizenship, Hillary Rodham Clinton would have made it biggest missile in her arsenal against him. A democrat would have exposed it. She did not.
This is one of those issues where books can be written about all the questions that seem unanswered, but in truth there's nothing to it. I listed earlier all the conspiracy theories that will not die because of a gap here or a missing paragraph there. This is one of them. Guaranteed.
But you go ahead and have fun with it, it must give you something to pass the time. Or perhaps, as Erich suggests, put that incredible skepticism to better use and revisit all that palaver you spouted about Jesus.
And you might want to consider the merest possibility that your entire motive in this has nothing to do with the legality of the election but with your discontent with the outcome.
I thought I'd just post this. Seems this is not the first time there's been controversy over this issue:
"Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886), 21st president of the United States, was rumored to have been born in Canada.[28] This was never demonstrated by his political opponents, although they raised the objection during his vice-presidential campaign. Arthur was born in Vermont to a U.S. citizen mother and a father from Ireland, who was eventually naturalized as a U.S. citizen. It should be noted that his mother, Malvina Stone Arthur, while a native of Berkshire, Vermont, moved with her family to Quebec, where she met and married the future President's father, William Arthur, in 1821. They continued to reside in Canada until sometime in 1828, when William Arthur became a Baptist minister, and successively tended to eleven parishes in the Vermont and upstate New York region. Their marriage and lengthy residence in Canada may well explain the confusion about Arthur's place of birth, as perhaps did the fact that he (like his mother) was born in Berkshire, and thus literally within less than a day's walk of the Vermont-Quebec border. Additionally, during middle age, Chester Arthur began to claim he had been born in 1830, rather than in 1829, which may have further raised suspicions about the nature of his birth (despite the fact his parents took up residence in the United States in 1828."
Further, it seems that no private citizen has the legal standing to challenge a question over presidential citizenship. It's up to Congress, and since the question itself has never—I repeat NEVER— been settled either in court or in legislation, if Congress has elected not to pursue this issue now, that should settle it. Because, you see, legislation would have to be drafted. The Constitution is unfortunately murky. They were more concerned throughout the 19th Century over children of foreign parents born here than vice versa, and they ended up deferring to English Common Law—one of the reason illegal immigrants are often keen to have their children on American soil. The reverse has been bandied about but never settled.
For all intents and purposes, though, Obama is an American. His experience is American, his education is American, the privileges of citizenship in his case have never been question. It has been settled by time if not adjudication. And frankly, folks, under the circumstances this is no more our business than the name of the first girl he necked with in a car (or even went further with). Congress has seen fit not to challenge it, so we ought to just butt out.
Now, you want clarity, write your congressman and demand legislation that settles this question. For now it's murky. As to where Obama was born, gimme a break. He was born in Hawaii. This comes under the law of too much fuss over too little issue. The shenanigans required to obfuscate these records to such an extent might be indulged by people with a lot of money, but they would be expensive and frankly just too damn much trouble for some bi-racial kid who at the time would be seen to have no future. It's bullshit. (Yeah, that's becoming one of my favorite words, but I'm losing patience to be polite over this kind of crap.)
Re: ‘Three different hospitals have all been identified in one way or another as Obama’s birth place.”
Big deal. One newsagency got the name of the hospital wrong and subsequently fixed it.
Re: ‘It has been shown that there are problems with the address in Hawaii given as where someone connected with him by the newspaper announcement was suppose to have lived.”
If you are referring to the neighbor who said that the Obamas did not live with her parents, she said that she knew that they lived somewhere ELSE in Waikiki Hawaii. However, they could have started living in the new address weeks after the time of birth. The witness said that they were living somewhere else, but she did not say that they were living somewhere else at the time of the birth.
Re: “His Sister who definitly was not born in Hawaii also has a Hawaian COLB.”
It thought this too at one time. But she doesn’t. She was not eligible because her mother did not live in Hawaii long enough. In any case the sister, Maya, is now a naturalized US citizen. IF her mother had been eligible could she have received a COLB? Yes. Could it have said: “Born in Hawaii?” No. The law does not allow the document to lie. Since Maya was born in Indonesia, the COLB would have had to have said: “Hawaiian COLB. Place of Birth: Indonesia.” That is what happens when foreign-birth CLOBs are issued.
However, the important fact is that when Obama was born even this was not possible. In 1961, when Obama was born, it was not possible to register a foreign birth in Hawaii. That was not allowed until 1982, more than twenty years after his birth. So, the original birth certificate in his file must be from Hawaii.
Re: “If Obama received financial aid from sources nobody cares to ask about it. If any were recieved under the guise as “foreign student” aid the man considered himself a dual citizen of the country that granted the financial assistance, or else he as an “American” duped these other nations who also believed he was a citizen of their nation.”
Obama was never a citizen of Indonesia, both the US State Department and the Indonesian government have said. There is no evidence that he was receiving foreign aid. If Occidental HAD given him financial aid as a foreign student, that would have been Occidental’s right. Occidental could have given him financial aid as a Transcendentalist (old American religion) if it wanted to, and that would not make Obama a Transcendentalist. In short, Obama was never a citizen of Indonesia. There is no evidence that he received financial aid as a foreign student.
Re: "Do the codes for Hawaiian citizenship run parallel to the rest of the USA or does each state have the ability to declare by their particular interpretation."
The code in Hawaii is the same in all other states, if you were born in the state, you are at birth a citizen of the state and a citizen of the USA. Obama was born in Hawaii. The evidence is overwhelming. There is legal evidence, the birth certificate that he posted — which is the official birth certificate of Hawaii. There is confirmation: The two officials who looked into the file and confirmed that there is an original birth certificate in the file (and in 1961 that could not have been a foreign birth certificate because they were not allowed to be filed until 1982).
There are the notices in the two newspapers that were sent out by the government of Hawaii for births IN Hawaii, and not for births outside of Hawaii, and finally, there is this witness who recalls being told of the birth at the time because she wrote of the unusual event of a baby being born to a woman named Stanley to her father, also named Stanley. (http://www.buffalonews.com/494/story/554495.html)