So Fox News has finally decided that it is ok to be born outside this country if you want to be President. Yes. Fox News says that Senator Ted Cruz (R-Asshole) is eligible to run for President despite the fact that he was not born in the United States.
How interesting. And how confusing.
Because for the last five to six years, we heard Fox News and the right wing attack the President over precisely that issue. Nevermind the fact that the President was actually born in the United States, as proved by both his Short Form and Long Form Birth Certificate. The conspiracy theories and attacks continued, and took the form of frivolous lawsuits and ridiculous laws passed to have candidates present their birth certificate before running for President to prove that they were actually born here in America, and racist investigations by Sheriff Joe Arapaio and others. All because the conspiracy theory held that the President was not born on American soil and thus was not an American and thus was not eligible to serve as President.
Ok.
So now the Republican Party is presented with a problem. It has a rising arrogant star (they love those kind) who has expressed interest in running for President. There is just one problem: it is admitted and is a fact that this rising star was born in Calgary, Canada. His birth certificate says so: Calgary, Canada.
So Fox News and conservative legal scholars have decided, nevermind!!! There is no problem!!! Ted Cruz’s mother is an American citizen!! She is actually from our state, the First State, Delaware! So that means, no matter where he is born on this Earth, he is an American citizen too.
Well, that’s interesting. Because, Barack Obama’s mother was a U.S. citizen from Kansas, too. So that necessarily means that even if the President was born in Kenya or anywhere else on the Earth that is not part of the United States, as the Birthers claimed, he still was an American citizen since his mother was an American citizen.
There was never any allegation or theory that his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was not an American.
So what was the point of all the conspiracy theory, the attacks, the reactionary laws, lawsuits and investigations?
The point was and is that Barack Obama was a black man.
The scientific theory Occam’s Razor is helpful here and is something I have written about before:
To quote Captain Spock in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: “An ancestor of mine maintained that when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” This is basically the theory of Occam’s Razor, the principle that generally recommends that, from among competing hypotheses, selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions usually provides the correct one, and that the simplest explanation will be the most plausible until evidence is presented to prove it false.
The simplest explanation of Birtherism was that they were all racists, and it has been proven to be right.