The ABCs of eligibility ~ By Joseph Farah

By Joseph Farah Posted: July 23, 2009 1:00 am Eastern © 2009 Every day I get countless e-mails from people who are just beginning to become aware of the questions surrounding Barack Obama's eligibility for office. Because I can't answer thousands of individual questions, this column is designed to provide a basic backgrounder on the most frequent questions – questions that could all be answered in far greater detail if readers had the patience to wade through the voluminous collection of stories on the issue we offer the public free in our archives. You can find the hundreds of news stories WND has written on this subject here. You can also find a thorough exploration of this subject in publication form here. Question: What about the claims by some other news organizations, public officials and websites to have seen and inspected the original birth certificate? Answer: I don't believe them. The statements they have made are ambiguous. They have offered no information to verify their claims – such as the hospital in which Obama was born. I think they have all inspected the same document we have all seen on various websites – the certification of live birth, which, as WND reported recently, is not even considered by the U.S. State Department to be a document with which you can obtain a passport, let alone establish a constitutional standard of "natural born citizenship" and qualify to serve in the White House. Question: What about those newspaper birth announcements? Answer: Newspaper birth announcements are generated by public health authorities when a birth certificate or certification of live birth is issued. Therefore, the birth announcements only establish what we already know – that a certification of live birth was issued by the public health authorities shortly after Aug. 4, 1961. Since that document is meaningless to establishing the constitutional standard of "natural born citizenship," the newspaper ads are less than meaningless. Question: Why do you focus so much attention on the birth certificate as opposed to other questions – like Obama's foreign travels, his student records, his passports and whether he could be considered a "natural born citizen" on the basis of his father's status as a Kenyan citizen? Answer: It all starts with the birth certificate. As an investigative reporter, I was taught to start at the beginning of any story – to lay a foundation of truth upon which the story could tell itself. Without a legitimate, long-form birth certificate, I suggest to you we do not know with any certainty who Obama's parents were. All we have is his story. If his story is good enough for us, then we should just accept it at face value and move on. I am as curious as anyone about the many other unanswered questions concerning Obama's life. But, if we can't get something as simple as his birth certificate, we're never going to get the other answers we seek. [CONTINUE READING]