4um: Palin says questioning Obama’s birth certificate legit

Title: Palin says questioning Obama’s birth certificate legit
Source: [None]
URL Source: http://rawstory.com/2009/12/palin-questioning-obama/
Published: Dec 5, 2009
Author: Raw Story
Post Date: 2009-12-05 14:21:59 by wudidiz
Keywords: None
Views: 1494
Comments: 183

Palin says questioning Obama’s birth certificate legit

By Raw Story
Friday, December 4th, 2009 -- 8:32 am

Update at bottom: Palin backtracks -- partly -- in Facebook posting

In a radio appearance Thursday, former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said questions about President Obama's birth certificate -- a spurious attempt to argue that he's not a US citizen and thus ineligible for President -- are fair game for debate.

Transcript and video follows.

HUMPHRIES: Sarah Palin here on the Rusty Humphries Show. One of the questions Jason asks is would you make the birth certificate an issue if you ran?
PALIN: I think the public rightly is still making it an issue. I don’t have a problem with that. I don’t know if I would have to bother to make it an issue because I think there are enough members of the electorate that still want answers.

HUMPHRIES: Do you think it’s a fair question to be looking at?
PALIN: I think it’s a fair question just like I think past associations and past voting records. All of that is fair game. You know, I’ve got to tell you too, I think our campaign, the McCain-Palin campaign didn’t do a good enough job in that area. We didn’t call out Obama and some of his associates on their records and what their beliefs were, and perhaps what their future plans were, and I don’t think that was fair to voters to not have done our job as candidates and a campaign to bring to light a lot of things that now we’re seeing manifest in the administration.
HUMPHRIES: I mean, truly if your past is fair game and your kids are fair game, certainly Obama’s past should be. I mean, we want to treat men and women equally, right?
PALIN: Hey, you know, that’s a great point. And that weird conspiracy theory freaky thing that people talk about that Trig isn’t my real son, and a lot of people that went "Well, you need to produce his birth certificate, you need to prove that he’s your kid," which we have done, but yeah, so maybe we can reverse that, and use the same [inaudible] thinking on the other one.

UPDATE

Following her radio interview comments about Obama's birth certificate, Sarah Palin backtracked -- partly -- in a posting to her Facebook page late Wednesday night.

"At no point ... have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States," Palin wrote in a posting she titled "Stupid conspiracies."

The full statement reads:

Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask... which they have repeatedly. But at no point – not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews – have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.

I see no one other then Palin, who will tackle the Jewish machine that put Obama in office.

To who? It's a diversion that gets her base giddy. It's a diversion that gets her opposition frothing at the mouth. It's a dog and pony show. It's not as if this issue will go anywhere....lol. And it's not as if there isn't a mountain of salient issues Saint Sarah could address, although without the same giddy and frothy responses from the overly emotional true believers.

All of these statements matter to the same two camps: her true believing base and her frothing at the mouth opposition. Were these statement of value to those outside the true believer camps? I don't think so.

Do you really think it mattered an iota to your average independent or libertarian?

The way Palin makes her statements is taken directly from Edward Bernays' playbook. He was the father of public relations (coined the term because people felt a negative connotation for propaganda) He new that you sold issues and people and anything under the sun, not with logic but with emotion.

Every statement Saint Sarah makes must contain loaded words. She can't open her mouth without them. IMO, you are making the mistake of allowing an emotional response to what she says without consideration of the content or intent. But, that's how she gets so much media attention, that's how she gets the base giddy, that's how she gets her opposition frothing--it's really quite a PR circus if you step back and evaluate what people say about her and what Saint Sarah says to attain the desired response.

There is truth to what she says – the other side is lying when it says there will be no death panels – when they say climate change is going to raise the sea levels ten feet – when they say Obama is a legitimate middle of the road American.

There is going to be change. The earth will change, along with the people inhabiting it. There will be more changes that are going to become more radical and more accelerated as time goes on.

The people who most resist change, who think that someone like Mommy Palin will protect them from needing to adapt, are going to get swept away by it.

Now that you mention it, there is quite a lot of resistance to doing things differently surrounding that enclave and the people who support it.

But I find it quite telling that the best the conservatives can do for leadership in these tumultuous times is a superficial, 40ish female who bounced around between 5 different colleges in 6 years when she was younger.

I like it that Sarah has little in common with a bunch of pseudo-intellectual North East trash.

You want to see people who knuckle under to the Jewish gutter -- then look at the North East!

For crying out loud, your_neighbor, read the coverage of Saint Sarah speaking on ol' Israel:

As Sarah Palin begins what at least appears to be a testing—if not a parting—of the waters in anticipation of a potential presidential run, she has waded into the murky stuff that is the Israel/Palestine quagmire.

One of the stops on her “Going Rogue” book promotional tour last week was ABC’s “Good Morning America.” Noting that the Obama administration doesn’t want Israel to build any more settlements on what it considers Palestinian territory, interviewer Barbara Walters asked the former Alaska governor/Vice Presidential candidate for her view. Palin’s response.

The politician responded, “I disagree with the Obama administration on that. I believe that the Jewish settlements should be allowed to be expanded upon because the population of Israel is going to grow. More and more Jewish people will be flocking to Israel in the days and weeks and months ahead. And I don’t think that the Obama administration has any right to tell Israel that the Jewish settlements cannot expand.”

More and more Jewish people flocking to Israel? What’s Palin’s source of information? Since 2002—the year in which the major wave of immigration from the former Soviet Union came to an end—there has been a consistent downward trend in immigration to Israel. By 2006, immigration was down to 1980s levels, during which time 9,000-24,000 people immigrated annually. And in 2008, the number was 13,681, representing the lowest ratio of immigrants to Israelis since the establishment of the State – 1.9 immigrants per 1000 residents.

Palin is perhaps not best known for her close allegiance to the facts. (See, for example, her discussion of health care reform this summer, when she claimed that bureaucrats on “Obama’s ‘death panels’” would “decide, based on a subjective judgment…whether [the old and infirm] are worthy of health care.”)

Meanwhile, her declaration that Jews will flock to Israel “in the days and weeks and months ahead”—plainly at odds with statistical trends—has an eerily familiar ring. In fact, it’s entirely consistent with the belief of “Christian Zionists” that a mass ingathering of Jews to Israel is the necessary prerequisite to the battle of good against evil at Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ. As Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) puts it, “We are racing to the end of time,” and more Jews (who, Christian Zionists believe, will either convert or face perdition) in all of historic Palestine are a key ingredient to fulfillment of that Biblical prophecy.

Indeed, Sarah Palin’s protest that the Obama administration has no right to oppose settlement expansion loudly resonates with the same approach taken by Christian Zionists. This summer, at CUFI’s conference in Washington, Pastor Hagee addressed Prime Minister Netanyahu—who was in Israel—by satellite, proclaiming that 50 million Christians support “Israel’s sovereign right to grow and develop the settlements of Israel as you see fit and not to yield to the pressure of the United States government.”

Barbara Walters, regrettably, failed to explore Palin’s rationale for the bold assertions she made about Jewish migration to Israel and the need for expanded settlements to accommodate the attendant burgeoning population. Religious beliefs might be their source, or they might not. The explanation, though, clearly doesn’t appear in current real world conditions.

It’s troubling to think that Palin’s policy pronouncements on the Middle East might be even remotely motivated by apocalyptic beliefs. Regardless, her support for expanded settlements in the West Bank is, in fact, an aberrant position: in conflict not only with the sound “freeze settlements, two viable and secure states” policy of the Obama administration, but also at odds with the views of every U.S. administration of the past 40 years.

Expanding the settlements, if not a prelude to Armageddon, at a minimum significantly hampers, and perhaps even destroys any remaining prospect for a just and lasting peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples. Going rogue in the West Bank is simply too reckless to be funny, or cute.

Michael Felsen is an author, attorney and Treasurer of Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring, a 110-year old communal organization dedicated to Jewish education, culture and social justice, and is President of Boston Workmen’s Circle. More information about the group can be found at http://www.circle.org and http://www.circleboston.org.