Published: PolicyMic (December 1, 2012)
The only thing worse than laziness is contagious laziness.
I refer you to the following headlines from Fox News and Politico:
“Ted Cruz Speech Fuels 2016 Presidential Run Speculation”
“Ted Cruz Speech Stokes 2016 Speculation”
Ted Cruz, for those of you fortunate enough to not be up-to-date on your Tea Party demagogues, is the Senator-elect from Texas. Given his Hispanic background and conservative bona fides, it makes sense that he would be especially popular among members of the hard right. One might even deem him a logical prospect for the GOP’s presidential ticket four years hence.
Assuming, of course, that he hadn’t been born in Canada.
I happened to know this because the buzz surrounding Cruz caught my attention several months ago, back when I suspected he would win the Republican Senate nomination in his state and wondered if his star had the potential to rise as highly as that of other Hispanic Republicans like Marco Rubio (Senator from Florida) and Susana Martinez (Governor of New Mexico). In the process of doing some basic research, I noted that he had been born in Calgary, the largest city in Alberta. After quickly shuffling that tidbit into my mental file marked “Not A Presidential Possibility,” I moved on.
Apparently the three seconds of research I conducted was too much for the reporters, editors, and fact-checkers at Fox News. Politico, on the other hand, only threw in a half-hearted reference to the problem in the end, one that blithely glossed over the glaring constitutional issue.
One has to wonder if the birthers will raise an outcry against this egregious error. After all, this is a movement that has whipped itself into a frenzy at the mere suspicion that Barack Obama wasn’t born in this country. They’ve maintained their rage even after it came out that the duplicate birth certificate provided by the president was legally valid, that notices announcing Obama’s birth had been printed at the time he was born in both the “Honolulu Advertiser” and the “Star Bulletin,” and that it would have been impossible for his parents to have made a 21,458 mile round-trip flight from Hawaii to Kenya just so their son (who they intended to raise in America anyway) could be born in his father’s native country. When Donald Trump assumed the role of chief spokesman for their cause (a development that should have given them pause in its own right), the president eventually managed to convince the Government of Hawaii to release his original birth certificate, circumventing state law in the vain hope that he would silence the fact-averse right-wing once and for all.
If they aren’t motivated by a desire to racially “other” this president or partisan zealotry, but rather by outrage at the notion that anyone would think of violating Section 1 of Article Two of the United States Constitution, then they should be nipping at the heels of these media outlets demanding accountability for their ridiculously sloppy journalism.
I’m not holding my breath.
The likelihood is that they will instead try to revise their interpretation of the Constitution, arguing that Cruz is rendered eligible thanks to his mother being a natural-born citizen. Of course, this will also require them to concede the same thing of Obama, since Ann Dunham’s citizenship has never been questioned… and then we get right back to where we started. In the end, the fact that this debate even exists in the first place touches upon a deep flaw in the ethical and intellectual character of the far right. If they had any sense of self-awareness, they would be ashamed of themselves.