Some things in politics are so over the top that it almost isn’t fair to poke fun. This one is the latest, and over-the-top it is — but I can’t resist.
The right wingers in the GOP, the Tea Party crowd, the Birthers, the rabid anti-Muslim folks and, of course, the closeted racists who have been frothing at the mouth for five years now over Barack Hussein Obama’s legitimacy are in a tizzy – a Ted Cruz-induced one. It’s amusing watching the antics of the truly wacky like Orly Taitz, Queen of the Birthers and serial filer of law suits[1] or the dissembling of bad hair-day narcissists like Donald Trump or even those self-serving politicians who used Obama’s “alien qualities” to get a little face-time on TV. My favorite here was Richard Shelby of Alabama who, when asked about Obama’s eligibility to be president said, “Well, you have to be born in America, don’t you?” (His staff quickly walked that one back but his words still hang in the air.)
All are now engaged in an ungraceful dance, ducking and weaving over Ted Cruz’s foreign roots for it has been revealed that he was not born in America but in Canada (in Calgary, Alberta) and his father was not an American by birth but a Cuban who fought (gasp! wheeze!) alongside Castro – before he had a change of heart and left. And these little historical facts are driving them bat-shit crazy.
Cruz is trying to head off concerns about his eligibility to be president but the deep question is and will continue to be: If he’s eligible as a “natural born” citizen (by virtue of his mother’s US citizenship), then isn’t Obama? Cruz holds (for another eight months or so) Canadian citizenship (conferred by his birth there) and he has an unacknowledged but potentially valid Cuban citizenship (through his father). Obama actually has a leg up on Cruz since he was born in the US, in Hawaii – yeah, he really was, really. But even the craziest Teabaggers, the ones who refuse to believe that Obama was born in Hawaii, have a problem. If the Canadian-born Cruz is “okay” because his mother was an American then Obama would have to be similarly legit even if he were actually born in Kenya.
Cruz is the (current) darling of the folks who think Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim, a Marxist who is on a mission to undermine the US and deliver the country to the socialist-communist New World Order that operates out of the United Nations (on our soil, fer chrissake). What are they to do about this obviously alien interloper who, is (was?) their favorite son?
Let the squirming commence!
[1] If you don’t know who she is, click on her name for her Wiki entry – well, pour a double scotch first, you’re gonna need it.