It occurred to me, looking over this mailman thing ...
In the early 1990s, I spoke with Mary Ayers who told me she was impressed with a foreign, black student. I do not recall from what country she said he was. I recall that the student had an unusual, foreign sounding name.
If this was Obama, why in the world would she call him a foreign student? Remember, the birther nonsense depends on the legally dubious proposition that although Obama is certainly a citizen by virtue of being his mother's son, being born in Kenya would make him not "natural born".
But either way, he was born an American. Moreover, the earliest date he could have been at the Ayers house was 1989. At that point it had been 14 years, half his life, since his return to America, and he had of course been raised by his American mother prior to that. My point being that he wasn't going around saying "Me gonna be big fella President, ooga booga."
So, it would be kind of weird for Ayers to call him a foreign student, since he was an American citizen by birth who spoke, dressed, and behaved exactly like any other American. But for the Birther interpretation to bear any weight, we have to believe not only that she called him "foreign" but that when she did so she meant
exactly that he was born abroad, no more and no less.
'Cos if she meant any less than that (e.g. that he'd spent much of his youth overseas, or had a foreign father, or a vestige of an Indonesian accent) it would be no use to Birthers, and if she meant any more than that (e.g. that he wasn't a citizen) then she'd just be making a silly mistake which would be no more evidential than if she'd called him a horse. Therefore, for Birther purposes, she had to know the
exact circumstances of Obama's birth and citizenship and then she had to use "foreign"
exactly in the sense of "a person who is an American citizen by birth and who spent most of his life in America and appears to be a totally normal American, but happened to be born overseas."
But no-one ever does use the word in that sense. That is not a sense that it has. For example, John McCain was born in Panama, a fact that is known to millions of people, and yet a google search on the phrases "John McCain is foreign" and "John McCain is a foreigner" shows that no-one on the entire Internet has ever said either of those things. I am the first, and I'm explaining how dumb it would be.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.
Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.