Politics

Steyn: Don’t end Obama’s presidency on the birther ‘rinky-dink technicality’

Jeff Poor Media Reporter
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Many anti-birther movement crusaders insist the controversy over Barack Obama’s birthplace is motivated by nothing but a deep-seated hatred for the president. These so-called “birthers,” they say, want to have Obama removed from office at any cost.

However, Mark Steyn, a conservative columnist and substitute host for Rush Limbaugh’s Thursday show, argues using the birther argument to attempt to end Obama’s presidency is the wrong way to go. You want it to end after his policies are discredited, Steyn argues.

“One reason why I don’t want to get into, don’t particularly — never got excited about the birther business – I don’t want this president discredited and kicked out on a technicality,” Steyn said. “This isn’t like when Snoop Dogg found himself up on that murder rap and got acquitted on a technicality. I don’t want this president to be convicted on technical grounds. I don’t want this presidency to end on the technicality of whether he was born in Hawaii, or whether he was born in Mombasa, or whether he was born on the planet Krypton. I want these ideas to die – the ideas to which he got elected, because these ideas are killing your country.”

Steyn explained the worldview Obama holds isn’t foreign because it is prevalent among the academic elites in the United States.

“And in that sense, Obama is not a foreigner,” Steyn said. “He’s like millions and millions of the Americans he’s lived among in Hyde Park – Chicago, at Harvard, at Columbia, at Occidental. These are the people who take these ideas about economic growth, the inequities of American foreign policy – they’re all entirely normal. This is the swamp in which he’s been marinated his entire life.”

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Thus, to defeat these ideas and not have them resurface, it is best to defeat Obama politically as opposed to defeating him on a technical issue over whether or not he is qualified to be president.

“And what’s embarrassing about it is not that it’s entirely foreign to the United States, but that it’s so normal to a huge swathes of American elites,” he added. “All the views Obama holds are entirely normal to huge swathes of the American elites. Those ideas have to be discredited. It’s not enough to end his presidency simply on some rinky-dink technicality like where the guy happened to be born. That’s my view on the thing.”