Results from Trump’s Eligibility Meeting

Sharon Rondeau over at The Post & Email has a great posting that covers all of the happenings that occurred last Friday when The Donald met with some folks from the great State of Arizona.

Mr. Trump is apparently fully supportive of Arizona’s eligibility bill and has given a handful of individuals lots of homework to do RE: further research regarding eligibility.

What’s more, Trump’s meeting must not have sat too well with Ms. Gail Collins over at The New York Times, as he wrote an excoriating letter in response to her missive.

It reads:

To the Editor:

Re “Donald Trump Gets Weirder,” by Gail Collins (column, April 2):

Even before Gail Collins was with the New York Times, she has written nasty and derogatory articles about me.  Actually, I have great respect for Ms. Collins in that she has survived so long with so little talent. Her storytelling ability and word usage (coming from me, who has written many bestsellers), is not at a very high level. More importantly, her facts are wrong!

As far as her comments on the so-called “birther” issue, I don’t need Ms. Collins’s advice. There is a very large segment of our society who believe that Barack Obama, indeed, was not born in the United States. His grandmother from Kenya stated, on tape, that he was born in Kenya and she was there to watch the birth. His family in Honolulu is fighting over which hospital in Hawaii he was born in-they just don’t know.

He has not been able to produce a “birth certificate” but merely a totally unsigned “certificate of live birth”-which is totally different and of very little significance. Unlike a birth certificate, a certificate of live birth is very easy to obtain. Equally of importance, there are no records in Hawaii that a Barack Hussein Obama was born there-no bills, no doctors names, no nurses names, no registrations, no payments, etc. As far as the two notices placed in newspapers, many things could have happened, but some feel the grandparents put an ad in order to show that he was a citizen of the U.S. with all of the benefits thereto. Everybody, after all, and especially then, wanted to be a United States citizen.

The term used by Ms. Collins-“birther”-is very derogatory and is meant in a derogatory way. Had this been George Bush or almost any other President or Presidential aspirant, they would never have been allowed to attain office, or would have been thrown out of office very quickly.

For some reason, the press protects President Obama beyond anything or anyone I have ever seen. What they don’t realize is that if he was not born in the United States, they would have uncovered the greatest “scam” in the history of our country.  In other words, they would become the hottest writer since Watergate, or beyond.

Open your eyes, Gail, there’s at least a good chance that Barack Hussein Obama has made mincemeat out of our great and cherished Constitution!

DONALD J. TRUMP
New York, April 7, 2011

Further, FactCheck.org has gotten into the game (thanks to the link from commenter brygenon), and I’d like to respond to their points as stated in their response’s Summary:

He claims the president’s grandmother says Obama was born in Kenya. In fact, the recording to which he refers shows Sarah Obama repeatedly saying through a translator: “He was born in America.”

In reality, and frankly, if you’ve had a chance to hear the actual conversation, you will notice a few things:

1. The grandmother is speaking in Swahili;
2. There was a translator acting as the “go-between” both the bishop and the grandmother;
3. The communications link wasn’t exactly pristine

Given these variables, it would also appear that the grandmother seemed somewhat confused by first stating that she was “there” when Obama was born, but then denies this. Perhaps she was thinking of her son, instead of her grandson? They both have the same names. We don’t know this.

Secondly, the translator seemed to leave much to be desired with respect to an ironclad translation from one language to the other … or it could have been the communications link. Again, we don’t know.

Thirdly, we don’t know if the grandmother truly understood the birth question. Was she first thinking that Obama was born in Kenya, or that she was in Kenya when Obama was born, and that he was allegedly born in America? Perhaps she was trying to protect herself from the Kenyan government, as there have been reports that Obama records have been sealed. We don’t know.

Fourthly, even FactCheck.org raises the question as to the tape’s authenticity.

The bottom line on this point is we simply don’t know one way or the other what Obama’s grandmother was meaning, so it’s no wonder that Trump reportedly wanted more facts on this particular issue.

He claims that no hospital in Hawaii has a record of Obama’s birth. Hospital records are confidential under federal law, but Honolulu’s Kapi’olani Medical Center has published a letter from Obama calling it “the place of my birth,” thus publicly confirming it as his birthplace.

I think by now those of us who have been following this issue for a while understand the concept of privacy laws; that’s not really the point here.

The point is why wouldn’t the alleged hospital in which the nation’s 44th President was alleged to have been born not have a plaque or other publicly-viewable display marking the site with pride? Granted, this is all anecdotal, but it is interesting to observe.

Further, places such as WorldNetDaily have shown further anecdotal evidence that questions the authenticity of that alleged Obama letter.

I know that detractors will attempt to disqualify such anecdotal claims as being from a far right-wing site; but then again, places like the DailyKOS are far left-wing; the truth usually outs with enough eyeballs on a subject.

He insists that the official “Certification of Live Birth” that Obama produced in 2008 is “not a birth certificate.”  That’s wrong. The U.S. Department of State uses “birth certificate” as a generic term to include the official Hawaii document, which satisfies legal requirements for proving citizenship and obtaining a passport.

I previously pointed out that Mr. Trump began with a semantical issue over the “birth certificate” versus the “certification of live birth” and that he basically needed to clean that up, which he did ended up doing.

The truth is that a long-form birth certificate — which has been proven to still be accessible by other folks receiving their long-form birth certificates from Hawaii who had birth dates prior to Mr. Obama — is very different from a certification of live birth. I don’t think anyone can dispute that. There is, by definition, more data on the long-form than on the short-form.

Further, on a case-by-case basis (again, based on anecdotal evidence that can be found over the Internet), the State Department will accept some COLBs over long-forms unless questions start popping up. Again, this really misses the point, as does FactCheck.org’s response.

What’s the point? Whether or not one can prove that Mr. Obama is a natural born citizen!

Remember — the point is whether or not the image of the alleged COLB could be used to establish anything; we don’t even know if the image is legitimate or not! The point is that it never has been used as substantiation, because no laws currently exist that require such substantiation. Therefore, it is academic until real paperwork starts flying.

He claims that there’s no signature or certification number on the document released by Obama. Wrong again. Photos of the document, which we posted in 2008, clearly show those details.

OK, so once again, The Donald falls into a semantics issue, because he was really ignorant before (as I’ve pointed out) and is becoming less ignorant (though I know detractors will disagree, as they disagree with anyone who disagrees with them).

Nevertheless, we have a stamp that contains a signature, so, strictly-speaking, nobody has actually affixed a really, pen-on-paper signature on the alleged piece of paper.

To me, this is also academic, as one could just as easily produce a piece of paper with the same artifacts on it — assuming that the document is a forgery. And since the Hawaiian DoH has never confirmed that this alleged document came from their department, we just don’t know.

Privacy laws, remember?

He says newspaper announcements of Obama’s birth that appeared in Hawaii newspapers in 1961 “probably” were placed there fraudulently by his now-deceased American grandparents. Actually, a state health department official and a former managing editor of one of the newspapers said the information came straight from the state health department.

Interesting. Maybe a detractor or two can cite the references for this claim. In spending over 2 years covering this issue, I don’t recall having had this confirmed one way or the other.

He claims “nobody knew” Obama when he was growing up and “nobody ever comes forward” who knew him as a child. “If I ever decide to run, you may go back and interview people from my kindergarten,” Trump said. Well, two retired kindergarten teachers in a 2009 news story fondly recall teaching a young Barack Obama.

OK, could they have been paid to say something? Maybe they were for real, but remember, Mr. Trump followed up by saying that nobody claims to have been around for his birth. Again, this is more of an academic discussion, because it doesn’t go to answer the eligibility question.

I’ll conclude this posting by saying a few things:

• When I state that some of the points are “academic,” what I mean is that both sides could go around and around discussing the issues in question and never get anywhere with them. Further, they would ultimately be circumstantial when considering the bigger eligibility question.
• The President could allow his background documentation to be publicly viewed, but I really don’t think he cares about this. Then again, I don’t think he cares about anyone but himself (e.g.: narcissistic personality disorder) and cares even less about what happens to this country (e.g.: “Rev.” Jeremiah Wright). Therefore, for him to spend any amount of money defending against individuals who wish to formally find out more about his past means absolutely nothing to him. Since no laws require it, he won’t show it, and to hell with anyone who cares anything about the question.
• The press remains quintessentially silent about the eligibility issue. It is as if once an image is posted online and less than a handful of people claimed to have known him at all (outside of his family), then that settles it. Worse, they have labeled folks like Trump a “birther” because folks like Trump dare to question any further than an online image or a couple of interviews. Therefore, note that the detractor’s response is, essentially, “Birther, shut up.”

-Phil

twitter.com/trsol

phil [at] therightsideoflife [dot] comSimilar Posts:

• Trump Releases Own Birth Certificate, Wants Confirmed Legal President
• Trump Releases Own Long-Form Birth Certificate
• Trump Embraces Birthers: On MSNBC; But Why Now?; “Eligibility Apprentice”; Eligibility Cartoon
• More Trump on Eligibility: CNN, Hannity, Arizona Birth Bill
• Obama Re-Election Campaign Officially Begun

Read more at The Right Side of Life