New questions presents themselves now that we finally can put the ridiculous birth certificate issue to rest. (Even if Obama were born in Kenya, which never made sense, he would still be a “natural born American citizen” via his mother’s citizenship, just as any American born abroad — while the mother is travelling, for instance — is indeed a natural born citizen.) The Donald, otherwise a huckster of the first order, has asked the right questions going forward: How did Obama get into Occidental, and thence to Columbia, and thence to Harvard Law? Show us the transcripts!
Having said that, this is a question that the media should ask, but that conservatives should not push too hard. Why? Because it’s really really really stupid, in politics, to ask a question to which you do not know the likely answer. What if conservatives keep banging the drum on transcripts, and then at the most opportune moment the president releases transcripts showing straight ‘A’ scholarship? That would give him a boost when so many other things are rightly bringing him down. I think it is telling, and a highly cynical media manipulation by Obama, and a sign of a pathetically servile news media, that Obama actually asked for and was provided network time this morning to make a statement about the release of the birth certificate. It is a subject unworthy of such attention. And it lets him paint his adversaries as fringe elements — just at a time when his poll numbers are again reaching record lows as gas prices approach record highs.
I have a real suspicion that his grades were mediocre. I also wonder how he managed to rise so high on the Harvard Law Review without actually writing published articles. I also have trouble believing that he ended up in Chicago at all without help, even way back then, from Bill Ayers, whose tenure in and around Columbia overlapped his own.
But I don’t know any of those things for sure. It would be nice to find out. It’s just not politically wise for major conservatives, or for conservative activists, to be the ones overwhelmingly driving these questions. They are questions to which a reasonably competent establishment media would have demanded answers long ago. They are questions that ought to be run-of-the-mill. They are questions that ought to be answered. They are not, however, the sorts of questions that should be allowed to run out of control the way the birther questions did. The real reasons to vote against Obama have to do with his extreme leftist ideology, his horrendous record, and his insufferable arrogance that leads him to push the outer bounds (and probably exceed those bounds) of permissible executive authority. That record is enough to discredit him. If the transcripts discredit him further, so much the better. But if they are released and show him to have been a fine student, they should not be allowed to overshadow his other, dangerous deficiencies.
