Viral Email Reveals: Obama Not a Citizen!

A NOTE TO ALL WHO COME HERE:  The following post is meant in jest, as the idea that a viral e-mail can actually “reveal” anything is just about as stupid as the idea that Obama isn’t a citizen.

If you believe this, you’re an idiot.  That is all.

-Steve T. 10/13/2008

The latest viral email making the rounds asserts that Barack Obama cannot be president because he is not a natural U.S. citizen. I got it from a friendly Bozeman conservative – I cannot reproduce the color and large print of the original (these emails are always designed visually to appeal to the sixth graders among us). But here it is in full:

Interesting question: CAN OBAMA BE PRESIDENT ???

It seems that Barack Obama is not qualified to be president after all for the following reason: Barack Obama is not legally a U.S. Natural-born citizen according to the law on the books at the time of his birth, which falls between December 24, 1952 to November 13, 1986.

US Law very clearly stipulates: ‘.If only one parent was a U.S. Citizen at the time of your birth, that parent must have resided in the United States for at least ten years, at least five of which had to be after the Age of 16.

Barack Obama’s father was not a U.S. Citizen and Obama’s mother was only 18 when Obama was born, which means though she had been a U.S. Citizen for 10 years, (or citizen perhaps because of Hawaii being a territory) the Mother fails the test for being so for at least 5 years **prior to** Barack Obama’s birth, but *after* age 16.

It doesn’t matter *after* . In essence, she was not old enough to qualify her son for automatic U.S. Citizenship. At most, there were only 2 years elapsed since his mother turned 16 at the time of Barack Obama’s birth. His mother would have needed to have been 16+5= 21 years old, at the time of Barack Obama’s birth for him to have been a natural-born citizen.

As aforementioned, she was a young college student at the time. Barack Obama was already 3 years old at that time his mother would have needed to have waited to have him as the only U.S. Citizen parent. Obama instead should have been naturalized, but even then, that would still disqualify him from holding the office.

Naturalized citizens are ineligible to hold the office of President. Though Barack Obama was sent back to Hawaii at age 10, all the other info does not matter because his mother is the one who needed to have been a U.S. Citizen for 10 years prior to his birth on August 4, 1961, with 5 of those years being after age 16. Further, Obama may have had to have remained in the country for some time to protect any citizenship he would have had, rather than living in Indonesia.

Stay tuned to your TV sets because I suspect some of this information will be leaking through over the next several days, weeks, and months.

The email is debunked here. He’s a citizen because he was born in the United States, the state of Hawaii, the 50th U.S. state at the time of his birth. Anyone born in this country, except for the children of diplomats, is a citizen automatically, by birth. Many would like to change that law, but it is a law, and was at the time of Obama’s birth. End of story.

More interesting is this: Where did this email originate? Who wrote it? How does it get into the “right” hands? (I am a left winger, and I never get left wing viral emails. What’s up with that?) Viral emails are a vital subculture in this land. Much information passes hands that way, much garbage is passed on without verification. If I were running a presidential campaign, and if I were unscrupulous, I would take advantage of the gullibility of ordinary people. I would make sure that untraceable emails like this went out on a regular basis. I would remember the words attributed to Mark Twain, that “a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

This email is officially debunked. Can’t wait for the next one.