The Birthers Have a New Angle, and a New Target

Well, they haven’t given up on their paranoid conspiracy theory that somehow one day old Barack Obama traveled to Hawaii from Kenya in 1961 to plant newspaper announcements in the local island papers, but they are taking employing a new strategy to prevent brown and black people from assuming offices of power, and they are going after a Republican darling, probably only because he is brown, but also probably to garner some bipartisan or nonpartisan cred.

Their new target is Marco Rubio.

[The Birthers] are not challenging whether [Sen. Marco] Rubio was born in Miami. [Ed. Note: He was.] Rather, they say Rubio is ineligible under Article 2 of the Constitution, which says “no person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

The rub is that “natural born citizen” was never defined.

The birthers rely on writings at the time of the formation of the republic and references in court cases since then to contend that “natural born” means a person born to U.S. citizens. Rubio was born in 1971 at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, his office said, but his parents did not become citizens until 1975.

“Marco Rubio was born a Cuban citizen via his parents,” screams a headline on a blog by birther Charles Kerchner, who obtained copies of the naturalization petitions by Rubio’s parents in May, igniting talk that is spreading across the Internet. […]

Kerchner said Rubio is no different from Obama, who even if he was born in Hawaii (which he doubts) was not born to two U.S. citizens. Obama’s father was a Kenyan national. The birthers say Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, whose parents are from India and were not citizens at the time of his birth, is also unqualified.

This new falsely created outrage dovetails to conservative attempts to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment to prevent what they call “anchor babies,” as well as to eliminate a little thing called “equal protection under the law.” Remember, Republicans love to discriminate, but I digress.

This new Birther angle also applies to President Obama, as he was born to a father who was not a U.S. Citizen. I wonder who many U.S. citizens alive today have at least one non-citizen parent.

The irony to all of this is what the Birthers use to support their argument is the treatise “The Law of Nations” by Swiss philosopher Emer de Vattel, which they say influenced the founding fathers. Say, how many founding fathers had non-citizen parents? I digress again. The treatise contains this passage:

“The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens,” Vattel wrote.

For a group that demands absolute adherence to the strict literal meaning of the words of the U.S. Constitution, and detests any hint of foreign influence so much that they would bar U.S. Citizens who were born in this country from the presidency because their parents are foreign, these racist whackjobs are going far afield of the U.S. Constitution to support their views.

The collateral damage of all this is Marco Rubio’s compelling origin story. We were all led to believe that Rubio’s parents were Cuban exiles driven from their homeland after Castro took power. The truth is, Rubio’s parents immigrated to the U.S. in 1956, four years before Castro took power. But that is another digression, isn’t it? I’m sorry, but when I talk about birther arguments, I get onset ADD.

Now, I wonder what will happen with all these racist teabaggers who went full on birther when it comes to Obama if Rubio or Jindal are the Vice Presidential nominees to Perry or Romney?