Mainstream Media Editor Decries Lack of Obama Vetting

BUT IS SHE SIX YEARS TOO LATE?

by Sharon Rondeau

(Feb. 26, 2015) — In a lengthy column on Wednesday, former Nixon administration aide and Washington Times editorial column editor Monica Crowley wrote that Barack Hussein Obama was never vetted before attaining the presidency in 2008.

Referring to controversy which began last week when former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said that Obama “doesn’t love America” and refused to apologize or recant his comment, Crowley opined that “The issue raised by Mr. Giuliani’s comment is not whether or to what extent Mr. Obama loves his country. It is also not about Mr. Obama’s patriotism or lack thereof.  The real point is as true as it is frightening: Six years into Mr. Obama’s presidency, the man is still a stranger.”

Giuliani made the comments at a private dinner to Republican potential fundraisers at The 21 Club in New York City.  In a “Politics News” column masquerading as a news article at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer responding to Giuliani’s comments, writer Joel Connelly instead focused on Giuliani’s background and “failed” bid for the presidency in 2008 in an open attempt to attack the messenger.

In a later statement, Giuliani said that he “was sure” that Obama “is a patriot.”  Connelly said that while speaking on Fox News, Giuliani was not satisfied with Obama’s public comments about the United States which “acclaim how far America has come in such fields as race, women’s rights and human rights” rather than highlighting items such as American exceptionalism.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who was in attendance when Giuliani spoke, was said by Connelly to have “scuttled for cover” when asked about Giuliani’s comments.  Although not a formally-declared presidential candidate at present, Walker has received high marks in several recent Republican straw polls and recently met privately with businessman Donald Trump.

As did radio show host Joe Miller while interviewing Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Tuesday, Crowley compared questions about Walker’s having left college before graduation to the charge of “racism” she claimed would be leveled if anyone sought to uncover information about Obama’s college records.

Crowley described Obama’s first book, “Dreams From My Father,” published in 1995, as the beginning of the “myth-making” which she said has accompanied Obama’s ascension to the White House.

On page 2 of her editorial, Crowley wrote that “Nobody has been allowed to get close to the origins of Mr. Obama, or to how they inform what he’s doing as president.”  She reminded readers that two “liberal” mainstream reporters admitted shortly before the 2008 election that they knew nothing of Obama’s “thinking about foreign policy,” adding that in her opinion, the mainstream media “didn’t care to know.”

Referring to Obama’s promise to “fundamentally transform the United States of America” five days before the 2008 election, Crowley concluded:

Don’t blame Mr. Giuliani for pointing out that the man carrying out the transformation remains a mystery. Blame the mystery man himself. And the media that continues to serve as his muscle.

Beginning in 2004, several mainstream media outlets, including the AP, NPR, and later, The Hawaii Advertiser, reported that Obama was born in either Kenya or Indonesia. In December 2007, MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews reported that Obama was “born in Indonesia” and had “an Islamic background,” speculating that Hillary Clinton might raise those issues during the presidential primary.

From 1991 to April 2007, Obama’s literary agent claimed that Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

Obama’s 2008 claim of his “Muslim faith” during an ABC News interview was quickly obliterated by interviewer George Stephanopoulos, while Walker’s statement that he was looking for guidance from a higher power, God, as to whether or not to seek the presidency, has been met with derision from a left-leaning entity heavily involved in changing military policy toward the expression of faith in the U.S. military as well as other “journalists.”

Obama has claimed publicly since 2007 that he was born in Honolulu, HI on August 4, 1961 to a Kenyan-citizen father and U.S.-citizen mother.  News reports have stated that he was born at Queens Medical Center and Kapiolani Medical Center, neither of which has confirmed his birth there.  At least one UPI report identified Queens as Obama’s birthplace, then changed it to state that Kapiolani was the facility where Obama was born.

Despite the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that the president be a “natural born Citizen,” none in major broadcast or print journalism questioned Obama’s eligibility for office given the differing reports about his background.  When eventually millions of Americans brought their concerns about Obama’s eligibility to their congressmen, they received nearly-identical form letters attempting to assure them that because Obama was allegedly born in Hawaii, he is constitutionally qualified.

A short-form “Certification of Live Birth” posted on June 12, 2008 at The Daily KOS from an unknown source contained a blacked-out certificate number and was declared a forgery by several experts.  The image was not claimed by the White House until May of the following year and did not appear at the White House website until two years later.

Beginning in April 2009, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) attempted to offer convincing arguments in a number of memos to members of Congress that Obama meets the requirements of Article II, Section 1, clause 5, which the Framers included at the insistence of John Jay and reads:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Ample evidence exists that the term denotes a person born in the United States to citizen parents.  In 1916, Breckinridge Long publicly questioned the eligibility of Charles Evans Hughes, who was challenging Woodrow Wilson for the presidency and was born in the U.S. to two British-citizen parents.

Various statements on the congressional record and in historical media indicate that the citizenship of the parents was equally important to the birthplace of a person in determining whether or not he or she was a “natural born Citizen.”

In an opinion column on Tuesday, Doyle McManus of The Los Angeles Times raised the question as to whether or not Sen. Ted Cruz is eligible for the presidency given his birth in Canada, suggesting that “If Cruz runs, he should ask a friendly state official to challenge his candidacy.” However, when presidential candidates have challenged Obama’s legitimacy, the courts have refused to hear the case, declared that the timing was wrong, or stated that the question is “frivolous.”

Anyone who has questioned Obama’s eligibility has been harassed, had his or her email accounts and telephones breached and monitored by Obama sycophants and government agents, received death threats, and, in the case of larger media outlets, reportedly received threats from the regime that its FCC license would be revoked if Obama’s eligibility or lack thereof were raised.

On April 25, 2011, two days before the White House released what it said was a scan of a certified copy of Obama’s long-form birth certificate in response to mounting pressure from Donald Trump, CNN aired an “investigation” it performed in Hawaii which allegedly found that “Obama [was] born in [the] U.S.”

Members of the Kenyan Parliament have stated that Obama was born in Kenya, which Obama’s wife Michelle has described as “Barack’s home country.”

Toward the end of its report, CNN implied that microfilm it showed was that of Obama’s original long-form birth certificate, despite Hawaii state law which prohibits the release of vital records or even detailed information about a vital record without the subject’s consent or the requester having a “direct and tangible interest in the record.”

In the four weeks leading up to the release of the image posted at whitehouse.gov, Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked why the White House would not release a more detailed birth certificate.  As Hannity asked questions, Crowley, skirting the issue of the missing documentation itself, linked what she said are Obama’s “European-style socialized medicine” and “nanny state” policies to the possibility that Obama “isn’t, quote, one of us.”

The media has failed to report that purported short-form and long-form birth certificates released bearing Obama’s name have been declared fraudulent by document experts.  A more-than-three-year criminal investigation has determined that the standard of probable cause has been surpassed in the case of the long-form birth certificate image posted on the White House website and that Obama’s purported Selective Service registration form is also a “computer-generated forgery.”

Instead of investigating the findings of the Maricopa County Cold Case Posse first announced at a press conference on March 1, 2012, the media has remained silent about the declared forgery of Obama’s only proffered documentation.  According to lead investigator Mike Zullo, Hannity had scheduled him to appear on his Fox News show following the first press conference, but Fox News executives canceled the engagement, citing fear for their jobs, careers or worse.

Crowley, a Fox News contributor, has not reported on the forgeries. Fox’s Bill O’Reilly has defended Obama’s documentation, even claiming that he investigated the short-form birth certificate after it was first released and found it to be authentic.

In October 2009, then-CNN’s Lou Dobbs’s home received gunshots which narrowly missed his wife after he had spoken out against illegal aliens in the country and called upon Obama to release a more detailed birth certificate than the Certification of Live Birth.  O’Reilly excoriated Dobbs for questioning why Obama had not released a detailed, “long-form” birth certificate and speculated that Obama might not be a U.S. citizen.  O’Reilly claimed to have “sent the documents” and determined through some type of investigation that Obama “was born in Hawaii.”  Two weeks before the release of the fraudulent long-form birth certificate, O’Reilly insisted on air that the short-form “certificate of live birth” was sufficient because “the state of Hawaii has once again said Mr. Obama’s birth certificate is on file.”

NBC Nightly News’s now-discredited former anchor Brian Williams stated in August 2010 that Obama “is an American born Christian.”

Following the March 1, 2012 press conference by the Maricopa County Cold Case Posse and Sheriff Joe Arpaio revealing that the long-form birth certificate is a forgery, O’Reilly stated that he “was too busy to look into” the matter.

The Washington Times has carried some news articles about the declared forgeries of Obama’s long-form birth certificate and Selective Service registration form but does not appear to have investigated the matter, which Arpaio has described as a “national security” concern, independently.  However, it has accepted paid advertisements placed in an attempt to educate the public on the unanswered questions about Obama’s past.