Dakota Beacon

The once respectable National Review continues its downward spiral, now in its incarnation as an online source.   On Wednesday the electronic rag hit another low point.  Under the anonymous authorship of “The Editors”, NRO published another attack on Sheriff Joe Arpaio, this time for his investigation into the authenticity of “official” documents provided by Obama to support his Constitutional qualification for the office of President.  It was probably just as well that “the Editors” declined to own up to their work here.  As John Adams observed, “Facts are stubborn things,” and we must accept them on their face.  For “the Editors” at NRO this apparently is causing considerable discomfort, evident in their little piece on Wednesday, entitled, “Conspiracy Again”.  A better title might have been, “Conspiracy Still” . . . or maybe “Whose Conspiracy?”

These “editors” begin by ridiculing not only the “beclowned” Sheriff Arpaio, but also his “wayward admirers”.  I suppose that this is intended to mean any who have harbored unanswered questions about this issue, “tea partiers”, people, for instance, like me.  I have not regarded myself as “an admirer”, much less wayward, but I do consider myself a “skeptic” and I am interested in the truth – or at least a plausible explanation for the curious features of the “official” documents given to us by the White House as “evidence”.  Remember, these items were actually provided to us by Mr. Obama and/or his staff.  We are just looking at what he gave us here. 

First we are asked to disregard the issue because it was brought up initially (“manufactured”) by the Hilary Clinton camp.   Well, this must be NRO’s attempt at posing as “conservatives” or something like that.  If Hilary said it rains a lot in Seattle should we disregard that too?  As we all know, even a broken clock is right twice a day.  The comment makes no sense whatsoever, and NRO must be taking us for absolute knee-jerk fools to try this one on us.  The “editors” move on then to the “fact” that we were given the short-form birth certificate, and then the long-form birth certificate.  The latter was supplied because the former has no meaning.  It signifies nothing.  The long-form certificate is the only item under discussion here, and is the focus of Arpaio’s investigation.  The bald fact is that this long-form birth certificate is not genuine, if we are to believe our own eyes and the apparently unanimous testimony of experts.  It is, simply speaking, demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt, to be a forgery.  Can we establish what is counterfeit and what is not?  I note that any time I present a $100 dollar bill, or even a $50 dollar bill at a grocery store it is checked for authenticity.  Our ID’s are checked - even by people we know – when we write a check or use a card for a purchase.   If we don’t have a genuine driver’s license we had better not be pulled over.

Obama attracted attention and got pulled over.  Never in our nation’s history has anyone with so secretive a life history attempted to seek election to so high an office.  This is unprecedented.  And yet we are expected to rely on the society page of the Honolulu newspaper of 1961.  Why should we think this is genuine?  Now, while as a beclowned and wayward Arpaio admirer with mental pathologies, I don’t strive toward the soaring artsy, deathless (and as used by these “editors”, ironic) heights of T.S. Elliot (“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”) , I am familiar with the more bourgeois Rockford Files.  Presumably anyone who has watched Rockford could figure out how to fake this.  But let’s not look for wrongdoing.  Let’s look for something RIGHT with this evidence.  Even if it takes forever.

Without troubling to address the actual content of Arpaio’s presentation, the “editors” then go on a rant about the “immortality” of “conspiracy theories”, citing their common feature that lack of evidence is taken to be “more evidence” of conspiracy.  Well, “editors”, there is no lack of evidence here. It has been supplied by no less than your infallible source of unassailable information – the White House.  The evidence, gentlemen, is precisely what is under scrutiny here.  And it’s not holding up very well.  It is not “mental pathologies” which are keeping this story alive, it is the evidence itself.  It is not sufficient to libel citizens whose only crime is to ask for the truth by implying the presence of  “mental pathologies” and to attempt to deflect this criticism by so doing is beneath even the contempt I begin to feel for NRO.  The deniers are the ones who think Arpaio is an alien from outer space.  They must think he pulled this birth certificate out of his ear like Shrek.  It might be that they are the ones who need to settle into the “political mental ward” to which they wish to consign Sheriff Arpaio and his wayward admirers.  That is where you will always find the hysteria.  We’re pretty calm about it all.  If we attempt to follow the twisting, turning “logic” of the “editors” it will lead us to the conclusion that the holders of the conspiracy theory are the “editors” themselves.  They are the ones without the evidence.

Arpaio felt he wanted to make every effort to save taxpayer costs in this.  After all, there is no reason why Maricopa County taxpayers should have to foot the bill for something the rest of the nation has failed to deal with.  He therefore commissioned a cold case posse, a resource available for other unsolved crimes and investigations on a volunteer basis which cannot be continued in the busy office of the Sheriff of Maricopa County.  Included, of course, were people who would have expertise or information useful to the investigation.  One such person was Jerome Corsi, a “conspiracy entrepreneur” who had researched this material.  As a writer, of course he has authored books.  It is interesting that this in particular drew fire from NRO.  I recall that “conspiracy entrepreneur” Bob Woodward won prizes for his probe of the Watergate affair, only he wasn’t called that.  He was called a “journalist”,  an “investigative reporter”.    Somehow that sounds better, doesn’t it?  Now, serious as the Watergate matter became, with President Nixon trying to protect his burglar friends from prosecution for a rather silly break-in, what with it precipitating the only time in our history for a sitting president to resign his office in disgrace and all, it does seem of equal or greater importance to the break-in of an office building to consider that the evidence in Arpaio’s case indicates that the man currently in that office may not only have held it unconstitutionally (Article II ) but that he would appear, on the evidence he provided, to have compounded this misrepresentation with the felonious commission of forgery and perjury.  Why is Corsi regarded as of less significance as a researcher/journalist than Woodward?  Because NRO’s “editors” are uncomfortable?  Why should they be?

The NRO hacks continue on their tirade.  Not only have they read T.S. Elliot, they appear to have made it through page one of A Tale of Two Cities:  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .

Obamacare either will be uprooted or it will be entrenched, the growth of the deficit either will be curtailed or it will run rampant, our ability to see to our national-security interests either will be reinforced or it will be diminished, the Supreme Court either will become more a guardian of the Constitution or it will become more a guardian of liberal pet interests. And, barring some unforeseen development, the next president will be either a former Republican governor and business executive, a former Republican senator who has been a reliable lifelong conservative, or a left-wing community organizer born metaphorically of the Chicago machine — but born literally in Hawaii.

This litany of gravitas is meant to shame and humble us.  Has it occurred to the idiots at NRO that this laundry list of profundities would be somewhat affected by the removal from office for cause of the perpetrator of these woes?  Would that perhaps have an effect on our national security, our deficit, Obamacare, the Supreme Court and the next president? If we follow what is passing for reasoning in this piece we might as well believe he has the deficit in hand, that the Supreme Court will be nothing but improved with more Alinskyites on it, and what the heck , the next president might as well be Obama.  Finally, after throwing a scrap to ingratiate themselves with the Obama-haters and to preserve the illusion that they are still “partisan” in the legitimate way (that he was “figuratively” born in the Chicago political machine) and repeating the unsupported contention of this machine-bred creature that he was “literally” born in Hawaii, NRO’s “editors” take truth seeking Americans to task for imperiling our country in wanting to finally establish the facts and put this to rest.  We are again insulted with the pejorative of “birthers”, to give the impression that we are all wearing tin hats and code rings, a reprise of the “mental pathologies” slur.  No, NRO “editors”, this will not do. 

The “wayward admirers” of the “beclowned” Sheriff Arapaio ask nothing more than a believable explanation for the documents that the President has offered by way of “proof”.  “Proof” by definition stands up to scrutiny, it passes the tests applied to establish its legitimacy.  All Sheriff Arpaio seeks to do, all we ask anyone to do, is find something genuine here.  So far we have not.  If this were a $100 bill it wouldn’t buy my groceries.  If this were an application for the job of checkout girl it wouldn’t get me hired.  If I were driving on a public street it wouldn’t save me a citation, it wouldn’t get me into college, a loan at a bank (loan?  I couldn’t even open an account at one!) or a car dealership, or a library card.  It wouldn’t get me to first base.  In fact, if I presented this, all it would get me is arrested. So why are we supposed to accept it as bona fide credentials for the highest office in the greatest nation on earth?  The Emperor has NO CLOTHES and the President has NO BIRTH CERTIFICATE.  And by the way,  just who are you “editors”, “literally”?  Who in hell are you who don’t sign your names to this one?  I guess that tells us what YOU are “metaphorically”. 

The bottom line in this is becoming ever more clear to some of us who are at leisure to think in the political mental ward that the United States has become.  The press is afraid of the truth.  The mechanism for informing the public, so vital to effective and proper self-government, has broken down.  Whether through an essential factor of fear on spec or through intimidation implied or specific in this particular subject area it does not really matter.  The result is a people left uninformed about issues critical to their decision making and their future.  We saw this in North Dakota a year ago when the Valley Tea Party Conservative Coalition invited every sheriff in North Dakota to be our guests at a breakfast with Sheriff Richard Mack.  Mack was the man who took the Brady Bill to the Supreme Court and won a firm decision on the 10^th Amendment that that law was unconstitutional.  One would think that law enforcement professionals would have flocked to speak with him and hear his story and question him.  Not one did. The one we contacted informed us that the county attorney in his jurisdiction had advised him to “stay away from it”.  There it is, folks.   You decide.  If there were no story in Mack’s case, if there were no evidence in Arpaio’s case, who would be so afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?  But we have become a nation of cowards ruled by thugs.  Can we change this?  Yes.  Will we?

Links:  http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/292780/conspiracy-again-editors, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1wiGDYPALI

Sally Morris wears several tin hats.  She is a member of Americans for Constitutional Government, the Executive Committee of the Valley Tea Party Conservative Coalition, for whose website (vtpcc.com) she regularly blogs, and a confirmed birther.