It’s the dementia. If you go back and read some of his birther nonsense for instance, it was clearly complete bullshit, but there was at least a thread of pseudo coherence to it that people who really really wanted to believe because they were racist could grasp onto. This is just complete mush.
The steep irony of birtherism is that, had Obama lost and McCain won the election, it would had to have been legally adjudicated whether or not McCain was actually a viable candidate based on the circumstances of his birth.
McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone the year before people born in the PCZ were automatically granted citizenship at birth. The same rule retroactively provided people like McCain citizenship, but he was quite clearly not a citizen of the US at birth as is required by the constitution. Arguably he would have never been allowed to be president because of that fact. But everybody was too distracted with racist birtherism to care about that reality, and ultimately the actual born citizen (Obama) ended up winning. So the issue never was settled formally
It’s the dementia. If you go back and read some of his birther nonsense for instance, it was clearly complete bullshit, but there was at least a thread of pseudo coherence to it that people who really really wanted to believe because they were racist could grasp onto. This is just complete mush.
The steep irony of birtherism is that, had Obama lost and McCain won the election, it would had to have been legally adjudicated whether or not McCain was actually a viable candidate based on the circumstances of his birth.
McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone the year before people born in the PCZ were automatically granted citizenship at birth. The same rule retroactively provided people like McCain citizenship, but he was quite clearly not a citizen of the US at birth as is required by the constitution. Arguably he would have never been allowed to be president because of that fact. But everybody was too distracted with racist birtherism to care about that reality, and ultimately the actual born citizen (Obama) ended up winning. So the issue never was settled formally