Michelle Malkin is taking on the Obama Birth Certificate crowd. Here, she basically accuses them of being no different from the 9-11 truthers and the nutjobs who still believe that Sarah Palin faked her last pregnancy.

The plain truth will never mollify a Truther. There’s always a convoluted
excuse – some inconsequential discrepancy to seize on, some photographic
“evidence” to magnify into a blur of meaningless pixels – that will rationalize
irrationality. Palin could produce Trig’s umbilical cord and it still wouldn’t
be enough.

Alas, Trutherism thrives on both the left and right. Which brings us to the spate of lawsuits challenging President-elect Barack Obama’s U.S. citizenship. On Friday, the
U.S. Supreme Court considers one of those suits filed by New Jersey citizen Leo
Donofrio, who maintains that Obama is not a “natural born citizen” because
his father held British citizenship.

There may be a seed of a legitimate constitutional issue to explore here (how is the citizenship requirement enforced for presidential candidates, anyway?) And at least Donofrio concedes that Obama was born in Hawaii. But a dangerously large segment of the birth certificate hunters have lurched into rabid Truther territory. The most
prominent crusader against Obama’s American citizenship claim, lawyer Philip
Berg (who, not coincidentally, is also a prominent 9/11 Truther), disputes that Obama was born in Hawaii and claims that Obama’s paternal grandmother told him she saw Obama born in Kenya.

I can't help but agree. There has been nothing about this controversy that has rung true to me in the least, and the people who cling tenaciously to it do themselves, and (by association) anyone who opposes Obama a great disservice by undermining the legitimacy of any real criticism that may be had.

But Michelle brings up an interesting side note. There may be a seed of a legitimate constitutional issue here, after all. Nobody has ever established what the constitution means by "natural born citizen," and maybe we need to know this.

So I'm thinking that this really opens the door to legitimate debate on whether the natural born citizen, whatever it means, really ought to be there at all. Think about it. Let's say that Obama really was born in another country, but his parents moved him here shortly thereafter. Now, obviously he would have had to have committed some fraud to cover that up, which we would have a legitimate problem with, but other than that, how would the place of his birth, the place that he wouldn't even remember, have any impact on his actual abilities to serve as president? The fact that he lived in Indonesia for a time that he actually does remember, in fact, a time during which he was forming his personality and learning about the world, is not held against him. Can you think of one legitimate reason that his birthplace is actually important, other than the strict rule of law?

A person has absolutely no choice in the question of where he or she is born. Let's do away with the restriction on where a person is born and look at how they have lived, instead.

On Obama's NPR "Socialist Bombshell"

The transcript comes from, and audio is available at, Hot Air:

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society.

To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that. …

I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way.

OK, so a lot of commentators are calling this a pretty big deal, but I'm not sure that I'm impressed.

There's nothing here that we didn't know about Obama already if we have been paying the least amount of attention.

Here's the problem- if you haven't been paying enough attention (or have been willfully ignorant of the signs up to now), you're not going to be swayed by anything here. This is a typical "early Obama" answer (by early, I mean before about September of this year- with Obama, there's not a whole lot of late). It meanders about and doesn't really say anything at all specific.

There are two things here that ought to scare the pants off of those of us who fear socialism:

1) Obama strongly implies that he thinks that the Supreme Court's role should, or at least acceptably could, include wealth redistribution (as well as "economic justice," whatever that means). This almost certainly means that the justices that he would appoint, if given full reign by a supportive Congress and still moonstruck press, will make Justices Bryer and Ginsberg look like Pat freakin' Robertson. And those justices will be around for decades. But the problem is, he doesn't ever come right out and say that that is what he supports. There's no sound bite that says this that can be used and echoed.

Look, I don't want us to be in a world where you have to have a sound bite, but we are where we are. Particularly for someone who is still impressionable at this point in the game. You have to have something that can be packaged and grabbed onto, and that's just not here.

2) He imples that the Supreme Court should be, or at least acceptably could be, "set up" in a way that would bring "major redistributive change." He doesn't say for sure what that would be, but the surrounding statements strongly imply that a) that change would involve "break[ing] free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution," and b) that going beyond the constitution would be a good thing (as he stated then that he was "not optimistic" that this would happen- surely he was not envisioning personally appointing justices at the time).

Now, if you already understand that Obama is a socialist, then you didn't have to go through that logical process to get there from here. But, if you already understand Obama is a socialist, you aren't who we need to be talking to right now. The only reason that things like "Joe the Plumber" and "McCain has 7 houses" work is because they are easy to grasp and easy to repeat. This isn't. So it won't help.

Look, the fact of the matter, and I think that this current election shows it, is that most people just don't fear socialism in the form that Obama presents it. We have next to no economic education, and there is little to no understanding that redistribution has to come from somewhere. I have spoken to a number of people that I would have called well educated and informed and am shocked to find out how little they know about the Constitution- even fellow law students want judges that will do what is "right" or "fair" (of course, always in the their estimation), rather than what the Constitution says (and almost as many of them are on my side of the political spectrum as not, I'm sorry to report).

I wish it were different. I'll try to raise my kids to think differently, and I'll try to spread the word through this blog and my general discussions, but the fact of the matter is, most people just won't get it.

Update: Jennifer Rubin and Glenn Reynolds also think that this is no surprise from Obama

"there are really only two ways to interpret the Constitution -- try to discern as best we can what the framers intended or make it up."

No matter how ingenious, imaginative or artfully put, unless interpretive methodologies are tied to the original intent of the framers, they have no more basis in the Constitution than the latest football scores. To be sure, even the most conscientious effort to adhere to the original intent of the framers of our Constitution is flawed, as all methodologies and human institutions are; but at least originalism has the advantage of being legitimate and, I might add, impartial.

Says Justice Clarence Thomas. Ladies and gentlemen, it simply doesn't get any better than that.

Update: Ann Althouse disagrees:

You just conceded that "even most conscientious effort to adhere to the original intent of the framers of our Constitution is flawed," so why do you -- in the same sentence -- call it impartial? With such incoherence showing so plainly on the surface of your remarks, why should we trust your labyrinthine exegesis of the documents from the 18th century?

But, is "impartial" necessarily the complete opposite of "flawed"? I don't think so at all. It seems to me that Justice Thomas is saying that although it has its flaws, it is impartial and that is one of the reasons that it is the best- it screens out partiality.

Update 2: I just started reading the comments, and 3 out of Ann's first 4 agree with me.