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| Rob's Soapbox | ||
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September 28th, 2009 IT'S TIME TO LET A FOREIGNER RUN AMERICA One of the more crazy claims about President Barack Obama is that he wasn’t actually born in America. So called “birthers” believe that Obama was born perhaps in Kenya, perhaps on the moon, just certainly not anywhere in the United States. Such a revelation, if ever proven true, would legally disqualify Obama from being President of the United States thanks to article two of the Constitution which demands that “No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States…shall be eligible to the Office of President.” The question of Obama’s birthplace raises a far more fundamentally basic question; why is it that we believe someone born outside of our border is not qualified to seek our nation’s highest elected office? No greater form of hypocrisy and xenophobia have I ever seen. We seem perfectly content to allow foreigners of all walks of life to travel to America, start businesses, create jobs, pay taxes and entertain us to no end with their talents and athleticism. We even allow and encourage them to sign up for our armed forces, thus defending the very nation that puts a restriction on their ability to serve! Imagine…a foreign born human can take a bullet for America, return “home” a hero and then be told that they are not eligible to continue serving their country as the commander in chief of the very military he just finished fighting for. The lunacy is beyond hysterical, it’s embarrassing. http://usmilitary.about.com/od/joiningthemilitary/a/enlstandards_2.htm The debate over allowing a foreign born American to run for the presidency has come and gone over the years but re-emerged with earnest a half decade ago as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger swept into California. Before his bond measures failed and the Governator became just another go-along-get-along politician (proving, by the way that what I have always said is true; the system is totally corrupt and it corrupts anyone who tries to reform it), Schwarzenegger was hailed a potential national leader of the future; a Hollywood star with massive appeal governing the largest state in the union, people compared him to Ronald Reagan and began to test the public’s opinion on changing the U.S. constitution to allow someone who was not born in America to govern America. The people were not amused. Less than 1/3rd of those polled supported such an idea and as Schwarzenegger failed, popularity for the idea plummeted along with his approval ratings. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/11/30/politics/main658281.shtml I want to know what so many Americans are afraid of. No one I know is more pro-America than me. I have grown tired of hearing my friends argue that America is no longer the “greatest nation on Earth” to the point that I simply refuse to respond to such comments when they are made. I believe in America and its greatness but I certainly acknowledge that we are superior because of our system and our freedoms, not because we were chosen and deigned to be born on this soil. I as a person am no better than an African or a Russian or a Canadian simply because I popped from my mother’s loins within the borders of America. So again I ask what Americans are afraid of? Simply allowing a foreign born citizen to run for the office would not guarantee him or her the presidency. The person would still have to campaign and convince the majority of our citizens to elect them. If the argument against allowing someone to run rests on the possibility that the citizens of the country would make a decision that you are uncomfortable with, then you have, in fact, reached a level of elitism that rivals Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin and the like. You have become a behavior controlist; you want to tell people how to think and behave and if they dare to choose other than your way of thinking, you want their ability to make choices banned. In this case, the strike is pre-emptive, but still just as chilling. And if the argument is not that America is “afraid” of allowing a foreign born citizen to be elected President, then again I ask you what this country is fighting? Under what notion is it that we are claiming that only a person born in America is qualified to run the country? Under this notion, a baby born to American citizens in Omaha who then leaves America and lives in Pakistan for 30 years can return to America and run for president…yet a baby born in Pakistan but raised in America from the age of 3 months can’t run for the same office. Brilliant. Am I also to understand that Americans are arguing that our last many choices for president have done such a bang-up job that we’re thrilled with our choices and the results? Perhaps widening the pool of potential candidates might serve us well. Consider that no less than Albert Freaking Einstein, widely regarded as one of the smartest humans ever to walk the planet, died a U.S. citizen, yet would not have been allowed to run for president since he was born in Germany. Perhaps a genius in the White House would produce results better than bumpkins from Arkansas and Texas? I’m just sayin’. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1921/einstein-bio.html
Elitist sarcasm aside, there is of course a fundamental argument on behalf of allowing a foreign born American to be President; perspective. While I gather that most people oppose the idea out of some paranoid fear that Usama Bin Laden himself will be elected commander-in-chief, I offer you a fundamentally logical reason to give Jim Carrey, Gene Simmons and Wolfgang Puck a shot at the White House; perspective. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=famous+people+who+have+ Isn’t it possible that Americans have become so complacent and ignorant and spoiled that we have lost our ability to appreciate what it is that America offers? Isn’t it possible that we take it all for granted? Why is it that even today, in the age of hating America both within and outside of her borders do we still see reams of wildly successful people coming to this country and claiming that they are here to escape their homelands? More and more Europeans are coming to America to escape what they see as their crumbling nations and more and more of them are demanding that Americans stand up and fight to preserve this great nation’s legacy of freedom. Perhaps it’s time to allow someone who knows what oppression looks and feels like to step in and guide America back towards the beacon of individualism and freedom. Perhaps it will take someone who has seen what it’s like to be told what to do, when to do it, what to choose and how to choose it to step up and declare that America has lost its way and it is time to once again allow our people to free, wholly free. Wait…now that I think about, that’s a silly idea. Certainly no one like that has ever existed in history. Certainly someone not born in the United States of America lacks the ability to take the perspective of their own experiences and apply them to our land, leading us through tumultuous times towards the light of a better nation tomorrow. Certainly that’s a fairy tale. I guess that’s why George Washington was such a horrible leader. As were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and all of those other founding fathers who were born in British Colonies and rose up to fight oppression and create the very country that now bans them from running for its’ highest office. The hypocrisy of our founders’ is widely obvious for all to see on a variety of levels, most notably declaring that all men are created equal while owning slaves. While the founders were brilliant, they were not infallible or without baseless paranoias, apparently just like the citizens of America today; the founders decreed article two, that only a natural born citizen, could ever be president. Yet, not one of them was a natural born citizen. Look it up. The greatest 56 men to walk the world as a collective forgot that none of them were Americans when they declared their independence, for there was no United States of America. They forgot that it was their perspective and ability to see the future of America that allowed them to create its greatness. So be it. For all that the founding fathers did wonderfully, we allow them a few mulligan’s in hindsight. It is time to fix what the founders got wrong. It is not 1776 any longer and we no longer must be afraid of the world. Are we really so ignorant as a people that we want to defend the bigotry of the 18th century earth? It’s time to let a foreigner run for president. Someone who, yes, has spent a great amount of time living here and passes all of the standard literal and figurative background checks but who also still knows how great this country is because they’ve seen how awful the rest of the world can be. Whether it be golfer Greg Norman or game show host Alex Trebek I couldn’t care less. Let ‘em run…and may the best fuzzy foreigner win.
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