High court throws out lawsuit challenging Obama's citizenship...
By Jill C. on 12/9/2008, 2:54am PT  

Guest blogged by Jill C. of Brilliant at Breakfast

When Bill Clinton became president in 1992, there were many on the right who felt his presidency wasn't "legitimate" because he didn't receive a popular vote majority. When he DID receive his popular vote majority in 1996, the witch hunt began in earnest. Not one of these people uttered a peep when the Supreme Court awarded the presidency to George W. Bush in 2000. But right on cue, the nutballs are out again now that a Democrat has once again been elected to the presidency.

The "issue" of Barack Obama's citizenship status has been kicking around the lunatic right throughout the entire campaign season, and it's become clear that there is not one piece of identification Barack Obama can offer that will prove his "natural born citizenship" to the satisfaction of these people...

Clarence Thomas, presumably stung by Obama's earlier statement that he would not have appointed Thomas to the Supreme Court, showed himself for the mean-spirited, petty, angry little man that he is by agreeing to put the lawsuit by New Jersey attorney Leo Donofrio challenging Obama's eligibility for the presidency to a conference vote. In Thomas' world, it's perfectly OK for the Supreme Court to appoint a president, when there is no role whatsoever for the Court outlined in the Constitution, and it's perfectly acceptable to consider clearly frivolous cases like this one --- if your feelings were hurt. This stunt by Thomas, who sees his job not as one of upholding the Constitution but of settling his own scores and grievances, underscores his unfitness to serve. The man besmirches the post he holds every time he casts a vote.

Fortunately, there are still enough people of sanity (and will continue to be, thank goodness) on the court that the case was thrown out.

This of course doesn't end the matter, nor will it end the matter when the lawsuits by Philip Berg and others, which are even nuttier, are similarly thrown out. Lunatic lawyers are going state-by-state, filing these ridiculous lawsuits based on nothing but theories pulled out of their collective buttocks, trying to decertify individual state's election in the hope of getting Obama's electoral vote count below 270 to make him ineligible for the presidency --- as if this will somehow make John McCain president (or more to the point, Sarah Palin, since the Donofrio suit challenged McCain's citizenship as well). The entire exercise is ridiculous, for in the unlikely event that enough courts stacked with Bush appointments did find for these plaintiffs, the election would go to the House of Representatives anyway, and presumably the House would vote for Obama.

But I'm not certain that the whole point of this is to make sure Barack Obama, a black man with a life story that doesn't consist of false imagery of being a cowboy or a rancher or any of the other Village People drag that Republicans seem to worship, is never inaugurated. It seems more designed to get the story Out There --- to foster doubt by bringing these lawsuits to give these ridiculous theories the patina of if not legitimacy, at least possibility. This is the result of the unfortunate tendency of the media in the Bush era to adopt the Dick Cheney One Percent Doctrine to truth --- if there is even a one percent chance that a story, no matter how lunatic, is true, it is given the same weight of legitimacy as facts, and called "an alternative viewpoint." In the case of Obama's citizenship, the goal is to create enough doubt in the citizenry to damage support for any programs Obama might try to implement that don't further the Republican goal of further wrecking the country.

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