Sorry It's been a little while since I've written anything in a little while. I'm afraid I've been experiencing something that scares me. I didn't realize how bad it was until I read this article in the Wall Street Journal online. To summarize: people are challenging Obama's citizenship on the grounds his father was a British citizen and the court has never officially established what it means to be a natural born citizen. Many of these suits were filed across the country and the only person to take the suit seriously is dear Justice Thomas. (When I hear his name I always think of Justice Marshall's comment "a black snake is still a snake".) The case now needs the approval of four justices to be heard before the court. My reaction to this farce is hard to express in written form but it went something like this: "OH MY GOD CLARENCE THOMAS IS THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD" followed closely by post traumatic flashbacks to 2000. The stolen election flashed before my eyes and hyperventilating and shouting at and with my husband and shouting phone calls to my parents (who annoyingly failed to take it seriously). A friend of mine dug up some more info, I'm not sure from where, and discovered the punch line. Apparently John McCain was not, in fact, born on us soil. His family was stationed abroad and congress quietly passed a law declaring him a 'natural born citizen' before he embarked on his presidential run.
So most people did not find this quite as sensational as I did. This morning I found myself wondering why. Then I realized the problem: I've been happy lately. Politically speaking. Obama has more or less been doing a sensational job. I have not yet been disappointed. My complaints (among them a discomfort and skepticism regarding his appointment of Hillary) are quite minor. I have an open mind and a trust that he knows better than me and I am ready to be proved wrong. So when I stumbled across this citizenship fiasco all this rage and delicious frustration that I just haven't been able to feel lately suddenly felt free.
I realized I don't know how to play this person I now find myself being. For so long I defined myself as a radical leftist dissident. And at the same time I constantly felt frustrated with what I saw as a lack of pragmatism and political savvy on the left which I saw as constantly setting us back. So I was the idealist who worked for Gore instead of Nader and didn't really feel at home in either camp. In short there was always something really substantial to get mad at. Now I'm irked by the obsession about the Obama dog. It's kind of trippy.
I must make one thing clear: I'm not complaining. I am eager to adapt to this new world order. I'm just not sure I know how to do it. (Did you notice OJ is going to jail? It's like the world has been turned upside down!)
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Seems the Supreme Court is waiting to hear from me before issuing a decision on Donofrio, so here goes: While the Court is more than loathe to enter this dispute, currently it has no choice (thanks to the audacious one — and I don’t mean Leo, I mean Barack) and the ONLY WAY to bring closure, knowing CLOSURE IS ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL before any Presidential inauguration, is to back the original intent of the Constitution, meaning, Obama is NOT an Article II “natural born citizen” (albeit Obama may or may not be a “citizen”, a question heated by the steadfast refusal of the DNC or any of the Secretaries of State to require his birth certificate, which the Court will now not have to confront).
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