The Washington Times

The problem? Beyond the fact that “Article II Natural Born Citizen” appears to be a term made up out of thin air, those responsible for the ad don’t have a leg to stand on, legally. First off, they can get as many plaintiffs as they want; they still won’t be able to show standing — a particularized injury, basically — and that means the suit will get tossed, and fast. Second, the Birthers have just decided that their interpretation of what the Founding Fathers meant when they said in the Constitution the president had to be a natural born citizen is the correct one, courts be damned. And they’re wrong.

I’ve gone into this before, so to make a long story short: The Birthers believe that, in order to be a “natural born citizen,” you have to be born in the U.S. to two citizen parents. Obama’s father was a British citizen. As a result, Obama was a dual citizen at birth, and that, according to the Birthers, makes him ineligible for the presidency. They have seized upon “The Law of Nations,” a text by Swiss philosopher Emerich de Vattel that appears to agree with their interpretation, and decided that its word is law. There are some issues with that — first of all, they’re relying on a translation produced after the Constitution was written. Before that, de Vattel’s work didn’t support the Birthers — it didn’t even contain the term “natural born citizen.”

Beyond that, books by Swiss philosophers aren’t binding upon U.S. courts. British common law, however, is an important source of American law, and it indicates that if your parents are residing in the U.S., just being born here to is enough to make you a natural born citizen. That, at least, is the view the Supreme Court took in the 1898 case of U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. Because the case wasn’t really about that issue, and the discussion of natural born citizenship was a digression, today’s courts wouldn’t be bound by that opinion — but they’d certainly give it quite a bit of weight, more than any ad in the Times would get.

(Hat-tip for the ad to Think Progress.)

The Washington Times added some fuel to the fire Monday with an article headlined “Liberals seek health-care acess for illegals.” Unfortunately, the paper doesn’t have the best record of prizing accuracy over politics, especially not when it comes to issues of immigration, and this article continued that tradition. 

The Times’ story was just too reductive, as the response to it from conservative bloggers showed all too well. While it does make clear what’s actually going on — 21 House Democrats want illegal immigrants given access to the proposed exchange — the primary impression from the aritcle is that some liberals want to see illegal immigrants actually given coverage. That’s not what would happen if the proposal in question passed. The exchange is envisioned as a way for private individuals and small businesses to buy insurance at a lower cost; the idea is that they’d be pooled together, and so have greater bargaining power. Those participating in the exchange wouldn’t automatically get any sort of government subsidy for their healthcare.

The Times piece also failed to note one other key bit of information: With the White House having come out against this idea, there’s almost no way it’ll pass. The irony here, actually, is that the Democratic proposals might actually have the effect of making it tougher for illegal immigrants to buy health insurance. Problem is, even though that’s what conservatives seem to want, it’s not what they want to hear.

Breitbart advanced this thesis in an Op-Ed for the Washington Times. The piece is amusing enough to be worthy of reading in full, but here are some of the choicer bits:

Political leftists play for keeps. They are willing to lie, perform deceptive acts in a coordinated fashion and do so in a wicked way — all in the pursuit of victory. Moral relativism is alive and well in the land of Hope and Change and its Web-savvy youth brigade expresses its “idealism” in a most cynical fashion.

The ends justify the means for them — now more than ever.

Much of Mr. Obama’s vaunted online strategy involved utilizing “Internet trolls” to invade enemy lines under false names and trying to derail discussion. In the real world, that’s called “vandalism.” But in a political movement that embraces “graffiti” as avant-garde art , that’s business as usual. It relishes the ability to destroy other people’s property in pursuit of electoral victory…

“This is nothing more than the Internet version of Soviet disinformation,” Human Events editor Jed Babbin told me. “MoveOn.org and the little boys from ‘Lord of the Flies’ who run Media Matters want to make it appear that there’s huge dissension within conservative ranks on issues on which we’re most united.”

Breitbart complains, specifically, about MoveOn.org, then in its early days, urging its members to call in to Rush Limbaugh’s show and feign being Republicans opposed to then-President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. That may be true, but then if you believe that the normal batch of callers to talk radio — or callers to television, or people who write letters to the editor — are just genuinely curious people without any sort of agenda or personal interest in the topic they’re discussing, then I have a couple of American car companies I’d like to sell you.

Beyond that, the argument as a whole is, well, sort of ridiculous — the worst sort of nutpicking, especially as it assumes anyone believes the sorts of efforts Breitbart describe would have any real-world impact. And that’s assuming there’s even any evidence supporting his assertions, which he didn’t provide. The sentence, “Much of Mr. Obama’s vaunted online strategy involved utilizing ‘Internet trolls’ to invade enemy lines under false names and trying to derail discussion” is particularly amazing, as pretty much everyone else in the country had previously assumed the key facet of the Obama campaign’s online strategy was the small-donor fundraising.

So, you might ask, why doesn’t Breitbart want the right to ape the left’s tactics? And why haven’t they just done it already? His response:

The answer is obvious. The right, for the most part, embraces basic Judeo-Christian ideals and would not promote nor defend the propaganda techniques that were perfected in godless communist and socialist regimes. The current political and media environment crafted by supposedly idealistic Mr. Obama resembles Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela more than John F. Kennedy’s America.

Fortunately, the Washington Times’ Peter J. Parisi is on the case. Though he admits that “retailers’ sales brochures have been bedecked with Christmas iconography,” he still finds plenty of reason to worry about the desecration of the holiday:

[W]ith the holiday that dare not speak its name almost upon us, nowhere is that phenomenon more noticeable, or more indefensible, than in the advertising sales circulars of the national retail chains that come by the dozen in newspapers, especially on Sundays.

A review of those sales brochures from the day after Thanksgiving — aka Black Friday — through this past Sunday, shows that among major retail chains, only Kohl’s and Rite-Aid have used the word “Christmas” regularly and prominently in their advertising…

At J.C. Penney, it was an “After Thanksgiving furniture and mattress sale,” Sears touted a catchall “Friday and Saturday after Thanksgiving sale,” and at Lowe’s, the home-repair and hardware chain, it was “Let’s Holiday” – as if holiday were a verb. Office Depot similarly turned “gift” into a verb: “Gift smarter. The holiday gifts they really want.” Not to be outdone, Old Navy proclaimed an “Extravaganza humongous honkin’ 3-day BIG weekend sale…”

On Sunday, Nov. 30, it was business as usual for the rest of the pack. Macy’s announced its “The More the Merrier Sale” – “merry,” as in, well, you know. Circuit City boasted of having “The Most Wanted Gifts of the Season” (what season, it doesn’t say). Toys R Us claimed to have “The Lowest Prices of the Season” (ditto). The Sports Authority: “Only 25 Shopping Days left” (’til what?); By contrast, Kohl’s again proclaimed a “Christmas Countdown Sale.”

Parisi goes on like that for quite a while before asking, without any apparent irony, “Who, exactly, do PC-whipped retailers think is being ‘offended’ (other than the usual ACLU types, who have made taking offense their raison d’etre) and why do their marketing and advertising departments insist on being Grinches?”

Fortunately, there are some more level heads out there. At the conservative blog Hot Air, Ed Morrisey wrote, “I’m at a loss to understand the offense taken here by Parisi and the Times… [S]uddenly we measure the depth of commitment to Christmas by the way retailers exploit the birth of Jesus to sell goods? If we’re arguing on those grounds, haven’t we already lost?” Morrisey also points out, “Retail chains use the ‘holiday’ reference more often for commercial reasons, and in this economy, that makes some sense.”