Tag Archives: birther

Mitt’s Birther Shout Out

“Now I love being home in this place where Ann and I were raised, where both of us were born. Ann was born in Henry Ford Hospital. I was born in Harper Hospital.  No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised.”  Mitt campaigning in Michigan today.

Keep it classy, Mittens!

Mitt Wakes Up with Fleas

When you lie down with dogs…

Republican Convention sources have confirmed that unrepentant birther Donald Trump will be featured in a “surprise” on the first (and least-watched) day of the event.

Mitt asked for this embarrassment when he groveled for The Donald’s endorsement and had him host a fundraiser in Las Vegas.

Now Trump gets the legitimacy of a convention appearance and Mitt gets the birther-by-association taint.

Loose Cannon with a Combover

“Trump, for his part, couldn’t have done more to make Romney look like a weak nominee.  At times he seemed to outright dare Romney to either take his side or try and stop him, tweeting that Republicans risked losing the election if they tried to ‘disavow the place of birth movement’ and telling the Huffington Post’s Jon Ward that Romney had never told him to lay off the birther stuff.”  Emphasis added.

“Why Mitt Romney Keeps Donald Trump Around,” Benjy Sarlin and Evan McMorris-Santoro, Talking Points Memo

Both Obama and Mitt Face “Friendly Fire”

When you’re running for president, you focus on winning each day by getting your message out and trying to knock your opponent off his message.  If you win enough days, you win the election.  Every distraction is a day (or days) lost.

It’s one thing to take hits from your opponent, that’s going to happen, but it’s inexcusable to take hits from your own side, and we’re seeing that with both candidates.

President Obama has had to waste valuable time dealing with pundit Hilary Rosen’s reigniting of the “mommy wars” when she said Ann Romney hadn’t worked a day in her life.  Rosen is an obnoxious  loudmouth, a slightly more refined version of Rosie O’Donnell.  Obama has had to waste valuable time dealing with Newark Mayor Corey Booker’s defense of Bain and private equity, Booker’s effort to feather his own nest for a statewide run with Wall Street money.

Now Mitt is going through the same thing with Donald Trump and his birtherism, which takes the spotlight off of Mitt and puts it on the Donald, which is all Trump really cares about.  Every day wasted talking about where Obama was born is a day Mitt loses lying talking about how Obama is handling the economy.  Like Booker, Trump is out for himself, he is not a team player.

If you lose control of your message, you lose control of your campaign.  If you lose control of your campaign, you lose the election.

If they hope to win, both Obama and Mitt need to lose the surrogates who are sabotaging them.

Birther by Association

Donald Trump continues his birther ravings.  He’s now latched on to the 1991 pamphlet from President Obama’s literary agency that said he was born in Kenya.  Trump’s take — “He didn’t know he was running for president , so he told the truth.”

Mitt has scheduled two high-profile events with Trump, one in Las Vegas and one in New York.  Mitt either needs to dump Trump or Trump needs to back off the birther garbage.  I don’t see either happening, so Mitt will go through this campaign as a birther by association.

I also have a question for the birthers that I’ve never seen addressed.  They rely on a statute that applied to those born outside the U. S. before 1986.  That statute says that if your parents are married and one parent is foreign and you were born outside the U. S., the American parent must have lived in the U. S. for at least five years since he or she was 14.

The birther argument is that Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, was 18 when Obama was born, so she hadn’t lived anywhere for five years since she was 14.  But Obama’s father was already married to a woman in Kenya when he married Ann Dunham, so he was guilty of bigamy, and Obama’s parents were never legally married, the marriage was void.  Therefore, I would argue that wherever Obama was born (and I believe it was Hawaii), he was born to a single mother who was American and therefore he was American.