In the last two weeks, we have crossed the Rubicon in the media’s coverage of Barack Obama’s constitutional eligibility.
There’s little attempt at reporting by Fox, CNN, AP, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the rest. My colleagues in the press have ceased even to allude to facts. They are embarked on what appears to be a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign to assert there is no other reasonable position any informed American can hold except that Obama is a “natural born citizen.”
It is an accepted article of faith. If one doesn’t subscribe to it, you are ex-communicated from the profession and polite society. You become, God forbid, a “birther.”
Blustering Bill O’Reilly, for instance, just insists Fox News investigated this whole matter a year ago and concluded there was nothing to it.
O’Reilly doesn’t bother to share any facts gleaned in this investigation. We’re just supposed to take O’Reilly at his word – just like we were supposed to take CNN President Jon Klein at his word when he told the world Hawaii had destroyed all the original birth certificates, so therefore the story was “dead.”
Pardon me, but I’m a journalist. You have to show me the facts before I accept them.
What are the facts?
To listen to the propaganda press, you would believe that certification of live birth settles the matter of where Obama was born. “He’s got a birth certificate!” they exclaim. “It’s right here. You can see it on the Internet.”
However, that document proves nothing about where Obama was born. Nothing! Neither do any of the statements offered by Hawaiian officials who claim to have inspected his birth documents. Nor do the newspaper ads published in 1961.
Why? Because you could easily secure one of these documents for a foreign birth. One parent could simply fill out a form, saying the birth took place in Hawaii, and the certification was issued – no questions asked.
Hawaiian officials have carefully, almost lawyerly, couched their statements about the documents they have viewed. These statements don’t suggest in any way they have seen any Hawaiian hospital birth records or physician reports. They could very well be inspecting the same worthless certification of live birth waved around by Chris Matthews on MSNBC.
And what about those newspaper ads? Aren’t they persuasive that Obama was actually born in Hawaii? No, not all. In fact, those ads would have been generated by the creation of a certification of live birth by the Hawaiian public health department.
In other words, no birth in Hawaii was necessary for any of this.
That is the totality of the evidence upon which Obama and his apologists offer in their bullying, overbearing insistence that there is nothing more to prove and that anyone who disagrees with them is a flat-earther.
O’Reilly and Klein and Matthews and the rest of them basically tell you to believe them because they have investigated the matter. They don’t explain what they have found that is so persuasive. They just tell you that you have to be a nut not to believe them.
Now, I believe my news organization has devoted more time, energy, manpower and resources to investigating this story than, perhaps, all other news organizations in the world combined. But I don’t tell you to believe me on the basis of that. I offer up cold, hard facts – undeniable truths. I don’t tell you Obama was born in Kenya. I tell you there is no conclusive evidence he was born in Hawaii – which is a critical issue in establishing whether he is a “natural born citizen.” I will even go so far as to tell you without a birth certificate, we don’t even know who Obama’s parents were – making it impossible to assess his constitutional qualifications.
This is not a complicated story.
It remains as simple as that bumper sticker and billboard slogan I came up with months ago: “Where’s the birth certificate?”
Like it or not, Obama has never produced it. Hawaii has never produced it. CNN has never produced it. O’Reilly has never produced it. Nobody has.
And, as each passing day goes by, I grow more doubtful that any of them can.
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