Alan  Keyes, the conservative who lost to Obama in the 2004 Illinois Senator’s race, is back again with a fiery denunciation of the new President as a “radical communist” and “abomination” who “isn’t even a natural born citizen” and once (presumably when he was young) even supported setting aside babies who escape abortion for killing (?).

Inflammatory stuff….or speaking truth to power…. depending on what you think of Keyes.  Obviously, Fox loves him since they’ve been giving him a lot of air time on this, and the video is making a stir.

What is a “natural-born citizen”? It’s a citizen who meets one of  the legal criteria to be considered, by right of birth, a US citizen”. It’s not simply where you were born.  If you were born on foreign soil, you would still be a natural born citizen if at least one of your parents was a citizen who had lived in America for at least 5 years. Obama Senior was a Kenyan citizen. Obama’s mother was a natural born US citizen, although I’ve seen questions raised about that too.

There are also doubts if the marriage was a valid one under US law. Furthermore, Obama’s mother soon divorced his father and went on to marry another foreign national, with whom she moved to Indonesia.

The L. A. Times has a summary of the birth-certificate controversy, and here’s another at Salon, both of them from a critical point of view. I actually thought the issue had been laid to rest last year, but apparently not. Keyes and other members of the Independent party  filed suit  on November 13, 2008 (I was out of the country then, so I guess I missed it):  Keyes v Bowen, Superior Court, Sacramento, 34-2008-80000096-cu-wm-gds.

Previous suits on this issue have been dismissed because the plaintiffs lacked “standing” – which is the legal requirement that a matter brought to the courts have some specific, concrete effect on the person bringing the suit. You can see why. Otherwise, people would be cluttering up the courts with cases filed on theoretical grounds. Keyes, a former presidential candidate, does have standing, although that might be affected by the fact that the election is now over.

Alan Keyes is a very passionate proponent of the traditional Catholic position on abortion, and from that view point nothing he said was really untoward, although some of his facts are still in question on the birth certificate issue and his “fire and brimstone” delivery will strike many people as either over the top, hilarious, or both.  I also do think the word “abomination” was inflammatory and unnecessary. “Abomination” coming from an arch-conservative and statist carries Biblical overtones and will resonate with people who read Revelations (of John of Patmos, at the end of the Gospel) literally. Many of them will think of the “abomination of desolation” and  the “false messiah” (Obama is incessantly dubbed a  ‘messiah’ both by admirers and detractors) who precedes the Anti-Christ.

On second thoughts, though, I’m not sure  critics have a right to question the language on this tape, since it was the Obama camp itself that went out of its way to play up the ‘messiah’ angle. They probably figured that if religious rhetoric worked for Bush, why not lure away some of Bush’s religious following by cloaking their establishment front man, Obama, in dressed-up “preacher talk.”

A lot of Obama’s rhetoric is simply PR, as my post “Wake Up and Smell the PR” (over the weekend), alleges, and so what can I say? Live by PR, die by PR……

And, what if Keyes prevails? Then we get President Biden:

20th Amendment, Clause 3:“3. If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.”

Here’s more on Obama’s birth certificate and some of the facts surrounding his Kenyan father’s citizenship (Kenya was part of the British empire at the time). Obama Jr.’s Kenyan citizenship would have expired in 1982, in the absence of any renunciation of US citizenship on his part. More from the same website on some of the groups behind the promotion of the citizenship issue. I’m not sure that the website actually gives any evidence that’s incontrovertible, though, beyond a replication of a photocopy of the birth certificate (?).

Most of the debunking seems to be of the order – ‘he says it’s a dirty tactic, so it’s not true’.…or, ‘look who’s behind the issue.’

He says, she says is not evidence.  Its doesn’t go to the substance of the charges.

Other thoughts:

1. Wouldn’t a birth certificate be a minimum requirement for a candidate and wouldn’t intelligence have checked that out long before anyone was even under serious consideration for presidency? It would be incredible if it weren’t  so, given that even rather lowly jobs these days require quite a bit of a background check.

2. Why is the certificate number blacked out?

3. Are the type and seal authentic?

4. What about the categorization of the child father as African?

5. Why not just release the original and put an end to the issue?

More:

*Philip Berg (no relation to Nicholas Berg who was beheaded in Iraq), a 9-11 truther (not sure which of the many 9-11 groups that is), is one of the people who’d earlier filed suit. Berg also filed a RICO suit against Bush et. al. over 9-11.

*The eligibility issues was previously raised for Mitt Romney’s father George, who ran for president in 1968. The ruling was that he was eligible since his parents were US citizens, even though he (George Romney) was born in Mexico where they were missionaries. In 1964 another challenge was defeated when it was decided that Barry Goldwater, who was born in Arizona before it was a state, was eligible.