‘Birther’ Duo of Trump and Corsi Immune to Evidence

Donald Trump is not the only person who can claim credit, if that is the right word, for prompting President Obama to release the official, long form of his birth certificate yesterday. Another factor behind the decision was probably the pending release on May 17 of Jerome Corsi’s latest book, Where’s the Birth Certificate?

Here’s the product description from Amazon.com:

Over the course of more than three years of research, Jerome Corsi assembles the evidence that Barack Obama is constitutionally ineligible for the office of the presidency. As a New York Times bestselling author, Harvard graduate, and investigative journalist, Corsi exposes in detail key issues with Obama's eligibility, including the fact the President has spent millions of dollars in legal fees to avoid providing the American people with something as simple as a long-form birth certificate.

The question of where the president was born should have been answered definitively yesterday for any reasonable person, but Trump and Corsi are both spinning the release of the long-form certificate as some sort of triumph. Such is the resilience of conspiracy theories that are by definition immune to factual evidence.

I was alerted to Corsi’s brand of scholarship in late 2009 when he authored the book America for Sale, which supposedly exposed the conspiracy by a “global elite” to sell our jobs and our wealth to foreigners through free trade, NAFTA, and the World Trade Organization. I pointed out a number of factual problems with Corsi’s argument, including errors of simple math, in a tough but fair review published by National Review Online.

Undaunted by the latest development, Corsi’s publisher Joseph Farah told the Washington Post this week that he “fully expected this to happen” and takes credit for Obama releasing his birth certificate, exclaiming, “I’m delighted! I’m triumphant!”

Farah is now moving the goal posts, telling the Post that even if Obama was actually born in the United States, the fact that his father was a citizen of Kenya continues to cast doubt on his eligibility to be president. “If your father is Kenyan, how are you an American citizen?” he is asking.

Actually, the U.S. Constitution and 150 years of interpretation by the Supreme Court have left no doubt that the child of an American-born citizen, such as the president’s mother, and a legal foreign-born resident, such as Obama’s father, is a U.S. citizen by birthright. The only real question today is whether the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants are U.S. citizens, but I haven’t heard anybody allege (yet, anyway) that Obama’s father was in the country illegally when his son was born.

As President Obama said himself yesterday, it is time to put this silliness behind us and move on to the weighty issues we need to address.