Canada
US Soil

Crazy is the Family Business

ReThuglicans and your run of the mill Ayn Rand worshiping  mentally constipated conservative doesn't have much problem with logic. No, they simply deny its existence, just like evolution and climate change. Maybe logic classes in philosophy departments will be the next target of RePuke governors within their state colleges, once they rid the campuses of Zinn's "People's History."

Lack of logic seems to lead to a lack of constistency and the constantly re-emerging "birther" controversy is a great example of this. Years ago Mitt the Twit's father, George Romney (a much better Romney than the Misttster, btw) was a perennial competitor for the Republican nomination for preznit of the USA. I was young, and not particularly politically engaged in those days, but I don't recall people making an issue out of the fact George had been born in Mexico. George wasn't born in Mexico in a similar manner as John McShame had been born in Panama, to parents on military assignment abroad. No, George was descended from fugitives from justice who had fled Utah in order to continue to pursue polygamy.

Now that unsurprisingly the two craziest US Senators are the favored nominees for preznit in 2016, Ayn Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, Cruz supporters who were 110% convinced Obama didn't qualify as a natural born American, are convinced that Ted Cruz, born in Calgary, Alberta does meet the bar to be presidunce of the USA. One could debate the appropriateness of this requirement as the callow Dylan Matthews does inTed Cruz is a Canadian. That’s a terrible reason to prevent him from being president

I had to laugh when I read the part of Dylan's piece, which suggested that  George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson and Zachary Taylor didn't meet the bar, having been born in territories that weren't states yet either when the Constitution was ratified, or when they were born. Of course Mr. Matthews' lack of logic doesn't allow for the fact that at the time of ratification, it would be forty years before an American born president would be possible, and new borns, not being forty yet were hardly eligible to be Commander-in-Chief.  But the truly ludicrous part was.....

 A good first step when evaluating a policy like the natural-born citizenship clause is to see if other countries do it too, and if not, if they’ve suffered any consequences from that failure. And sure enough, very few other developed countries have requirements at all like this one:

 I guess Mr. Matthews forgot about the vaunted US exceptionalism. - you know the only country to drop nuclear bombs on people, or developed country to NOT have universal health care or to have over a quarter of the planets imprisoned population out of five percent of the world's population and so forth and so on. 

But Ted Cruz supporter manages to disqualify Barack Obama and allow Ted Cruz to run for the office with this leap of logic, to which some Canadians (not counting Spiteful Steve) might take issue! According to the Texas Tribune:

 KINGWOOD, Texas — When Democrat Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, Republican voter Christina Katok of Walden said she believed he was ineligible for the job.

She reasoned that he was born in Kenya and therefore wasn’t a “natural born” American — one of a handful of constitutional requirements for the job. (Obama's birth certificate shows that he was born in Hawaii, but some critics do not accept that as fact.)

Fast forward six years and another freshman U.S. senator, Canadian-born Tea Party firebrand Ted Cruz of Texas, is being mentioned as a potential 2016 presidential candidate. But Katok, who would vote for Cruz in a heartbeat, doesn’t have any concerns about his eligibility.

“As far as I’m concerned, Canada is not really foreign soil,” she said. Katok said she was more disturbed by Obama's "strong ties to Kenya," the African country where his father was born. She also said she didn’t like the fact that Obama did not release his long-form birth certificate during the 2008 race.

 For anyone whose stomach and brain can take the abuse, for some more delightful discussion of the Texas Tsar of Crazy, whose father fought with Fidel Castro back in the day, check out  For Ted Cruz, Crazy is a family business in Salon.