By
Jerome R. Corsi
© 2010 WorldNetDaily
|
Sen.
John McCain, R-Ariz.
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Many of the
same news organizations and research groups today dismissing concerns
about Barack Obama's constitutional eligibility were far more eager
to cover the issue when Republican presidential candidate John McCain
was the subject.
An
archive search shows the question of McCain's birth certificate and
his eligibility to be president was actively pursued by Democratic
Party activists and the mainstream media in the run-up to the 2008
presidential election, despite the ridicule now heaped upon those
questioning Obama's qualifications under Article II, Section 1 of the
Constitution.
In
an article published Feb. 28, 2008, months before McCain was
nominated for president by the Republican Party, FactCheck.org, at
the very center of Obama's defense against eligibility questions, was
itself raising them about McCain.
In
a piece that led off with the question, "How can Panamanian-born
McCain be elected president?" FactCheck.org
conceded McCain did meet the natural-born citizen requirements.
But the website qualified its answer, stating that if McCain did win
the presidency, the issue could be challenged in court.
After
the Republican and Democratic conventions, on, FactCheck.org
weighed into the Obama eligibility debate Aug. 21, 2008,"
claiming its "staffers have now seen, touched, examined and
photographed the original birth certificate." The certificate in
question, however, was a short-form Certificate of Live Birth, or
COLB, not a hospital-generated long-formbirth certificate listing the
hospital where Obama was born as well as other relevant birth
information, including the name of the attending physician.
Almost
coincident with the FactCheck.org article, a flurry of mainstream
media news pieces popped up about McCain's eligibility to be
president.
On
Feb. 28, 2008, Carl Hulse wrote a New York Times article, "McCain's
Canal Zone Birth Prompts Queries About Whether That Rules Him Out."
"To
date, no American to take the presidential oath has had an official
birthplace outside the 50 states," Hulse wrote.
Picking
up on the Times piece, MSNBC.com
ran a feature on the same day posing the question, "Born in the
USA?"
The
Wall Street Journal the same day published a Law Blog column
asking: "Does John McCain Have a Birthplace Problem?"
CBS
News speculated McCain's eligibility question "could
conceivably end up in before the Supreme Court," adding the
comment, "And you thought counting chads was a circus."
The
next day, the Times
of London published a similar piece, "McCain's Panama birth
prompts eligibility probe by his campaign."
NBC
correspondent Pete Williams also published a piece Feb. 29, 2008,
on the MSNBC website, "McCain's citizenship called into
question."
"Sen.
John McCain, R-Ariz., and his advisers are doing their best to brush
aside questions – raised in the liberal blogosphere – about
whether he is qualified under the Constitutionto be president,"
Williams wrote. "But many legal scholars and government lawyers
say it's a serious question with no clear answer."
On
April 10, 2008, ABC
reporter Jake Tapper published a piece on the ABC News website in
which he noted the Constitution "does not define 'natural born
citizen,'" pointing out that "McCain was born in the Panama
Canal Zone to parents who were U.S. citizens, but some scholars have
questioned that it suffices."
Then,
on April 11, 2008, the Wall
Street Journal's Law Blog published a piece noting that Sens.
Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., introduced a
non-binding resolution expressing McCain qualifies as a natural-born
citizen under terms of the Constitution.
The
Leahy-McCaskill resolution, ultimately passed by the Senate
unanimously was co-sponsored by Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary
Clinton, who at the time were competing for the Democratic Party's
presidential nomination.
Even
this was not enough to stop liberal activists and the mainstream
media from continuing to keep alive questions about McCain's
eligibility.
In
a Washington
Post story May 2, 2008, reporter Michael Dobbs questioned whether
the Senate's unanimously passed resolution was sufficient to settle
the matter of whether McCain was a natural-born citizen eligibleto be
president.
Dismissing
the Senate resolution, Dobbs wrote that the Senate vote "is
simply an opinion that has little bearing on an arcane constitutional
debate that has preoccupied legal scholars for many weeks."
Dobbs
noted at the time the article was published "three pending cases
are challenging McCain's right to be president" because even
though both his parents were U.S. citizens, his father was in the
Navy, and McCain was born at the U.S. Naval Station based in Coco
Solo in the Panama Canal Zone on Aug. 29, 1939.
While
acknowledging that a senior official of the McCain campaign had shown
reporters a copy of McCain's birth certificate issued by the Canal
Zone hospital – something the Obama presidential campaign and
presidency have so far refused to do – he questioned why McCain did
not release thebirth certificate to the press generally.
In
addition to media scrutiny, McCain testified before a U.S. Senate
committee and produced his long-form birth certificate for
inspection.
On
May 12, 2008, PolitiFact.com, a website that has dismissed questions
about Obama's eligibility, published
an article authored by Robert Farley, "Was McCain born in the
USA?"
Noting
that the question of McCain's eligibility is "rooted in legal
opinions," not in facts, PolitiFact.org begged off giving
McCain's eligibility question a truth rating, claiming its "customary
True-False ratings don't quite fit here."
PolitiFact
repeated the Washington Post complaint that McCain had not released
his hospital-generated birth certificate publically, opting instead
to "let a Washington Post reporter take a peek at it."
PolitiFact,
however, did not note that the Obama campaign refused all inquiries
asking to see the Illinois senator's hospital-generated
long-formbirth certificate.
PolitiFact
also dismissed congressional resolutions affirming McCain's
eligibility to be president as a natural-born citizen, quoting
Atlanta attorney Jill Pryor, who wrote a 20-year-old paper published
in the Yale Law Journal in which she argued that Congress'
interpretation of the natural-born citizen clause is not binding on
the courts.
On
June 12, 2008, the left-leaning DailyKos.com
posted a piece by blogger "andyfoland", "The
Bombshell on McCain's Birth Certificate," claiming McCain had
"no interest in releasing his birth certificate" because he
"actually wasn't born in the United States," and "McCain
has done a good job keeping the public at large from catching on that
he was born in Panama."
On
June 20, 2008, editorial writer Todd
Roberson wrote in a Dallas Morning News opinion blog that
McCain's citizenship was "still in question," after a
lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District courts questioning the issue.
Displaying
what he claimed was a copy of McCain's hospital-generated long-form
birth certificate, Robberson wrote, "The argument is very strong
against McCain being regarded 'a natural-born' citizen' as required
by law."
Why?
"[McCain]
was born in Panama in 1936, at a time when the State Department and
the Hay-Bunau Treaty, which granted the U.S. access to the Panama
Canal Zone, specifically stated that the Canal Zone was not sovereign
U.S. territory," Robberson argued.
To
drive home the point, a link
in Robberson's piece displayed as a .pdf file the lawsuit papers
filed by plaintiff Fred Hollander in the U.S. District Court in New
Hampshire questioning McCain's eligibility.
The
New York Times returned once again to McCain's eligibility in a July
11, 2008, article
published by law reporter Adam Liptak, with contributions from Carl
Hulse, "A Hint of New Life to a McCain Birth Issue."
The
New York Times featured an analysis by University of Arizona law
professor Gabriel J. Chin that asserted a 1937 law conferred
citizenship on children of American parents born in the Canal Zone
after 2004, arguing the law made John McCain a citizen just before
his first birthday.
"In
his paper and in an interview, Professor Chin, a registered Democrat,
insisted he had no political motive in raising the question,"
the Times wrote.
UPI
published a story July 11, 2008, under the headline "McCain
not natural-born citizen, prof says," repeating the New York
Times story about Gabriel Chin's legal analysis.
A
lawsuit challenging McCain's qualifications was pending in a federal
court in Concord, N.H., the UPI story noted.
Newsbuster.org
characterized Liptak's New York Times article as "a
meaningless, but prominently placed, 900-word story to further chip
away at John McCain's stature," noting the New York Times had
yet to publish an article discussing Internet questioning about
Obama's eligibility.
In
July 2008, Snopes.com, which portrays itself as an independent
fact-checker, classified
as "undetermined" the claim that John McCain does not
qualify to be president as a natural-born citizen.
"As
much as we'd like to dismiss this one as just another frivolous
election season rumor, it's impossible to make any definitive
statement about Senator McCain's presidential eligibility because the
issue is a matter of law rather than fact, and the law is ambiguous,"
Snopes.com wrote.
But
only one month before, in June 2008, Snopes.com
confidently disqualified as "false" the assertion that
Barack Obama was not eligible to be president, affirming instead
that he was a natural-born citizen within the meaning of Article II,
Section 1.
With
equal confidence, Snopes.com
in the same month dismissed as "false" the claim that the
short-form Certificate of Live Birth provided by the Obama
presidential campaign was a forgery.
On
Sept. 18, 2008, after McCain had won the Republican Party
presidential nomination, Law.com
reported a San Francisco federal judge ruled McCain's assertion of
U.S. citizenship was "highly probable."
Third-party
presidential candidate Alan Keyes was excoriated for bringing a
federal lawsuit challenging Obama's eligibility, but as the Law.com
article pointed out, Keyes had also brought the U.S. District court
challenge of McCain's eligibility.
Throughout
the 2008 presidential campaign, the Web
continued to buzz with stories questioning McCain's eligibility
without reporting similar issues were being raised about Obama.
