by Diana West
Syndicated Coulumn

Get ready for the last straw.

First, though, I’d like to suggest that anyone reading this column in a local newspaper or news site pat the editor on the back for publishing what in our neo-medieval world of fear amounts to a “forbidden” column.

Yup, I am about to say something about the Great Barack Obama Identity/Eligibility Scandal again. I know that this is one rich and urgent topic that doesn’t see the light of day in certain so-called news outlets – and I say that from the experience of watching my own syndicated columns fail to appear when covering news of the White House press conference where the president’s long-form birth certificate was unveiled, news of courtroom proceedings in various states on Obama’s ballot eligibility and news of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s investigators presenting evidence that the online Obama birth certificate is a forgery (and much more).

So be it. This was, as noted, the last straw.

I refer to something radio host Sean Hannity said on his show this week. He was speaking in rebuttal to a Democrat arguing that racism was a problem among conservatives. As evidence, the Democrat brought up the “birther issue” – the label used to encapsulate any topic related to Obama’s identity documents and constitutional eligibility. Erroneously, it is a label that narrowly connotes, and derisively so, only the belief that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

In fact, the whereabouts of Obama’s nativity is in no way the main bone of “birther” contention, despite the blinkered focus on it by the enforcers of silence. Of far greater concern to me, for starters, is the purportedly original documentation President Obama belatedly provided the American people to attest to his identity.

I refer to the electronic image of a long-form 1961 Hawaiian birth certificate posted at the White House website. After studying various evidence and demonstrations (which I’ve written about in previous “forbidden” columns), I’ve concluded that this online image is in all probability a forgery.

So has Sheriff Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse out in Maricopa County, Ariz. So, too, has the Israel Science and Technology website, a national database and directory of science- and technology-related sites in Israel established by Benjamin Netanyahu’s former science adviser, molecular biologist Israel Hanukoglu, Ph.D.

If these investigations are correct, we are looking at the greatest fraud in modern history as put over by the flimflam administration and enabled by armies of accessories practically everywhere else.

There is a second issue to consider that also has nothing to do with what is commonly meant by the “birther” issue. Having weighed the arguments, it seems to me that by virtue of having a British subject for a father, Barack Obama Jr. is constitutionally ineligible to be president of the United States, no matter where he was born.

With a British father, Obama cannot meet the constitutional requirement of having been “natural born,” which is a different and more restrictive category than “native born.” Similarly ineligible, I would add, are Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and, alas, Ted Cruz of Texas, both of whom have parents who were not citizens when they were born.

So, getting back to the Obama case, tell me where the “racism” is in these concerns. Where is it? Identity theft per se is hardly a pathology of black America. Meanwhile, British paternity, even if it does, in Obama’s case, come via Africa, is the very disqualifier the founders had in mind on crafting the “natural born” criterion more than two centuries ago to guard against a president with divided loyalties. Where is the racism in trying to address these weighty matters of the Constitution, law and state?

Nowhere. “Racism” is simply a buzzword to further stymie the already strangled “birther” issue.

So how did Hannity reply to the argument that conservatives were “racist” due to broaching the “birther” argument?

He challenged his interlocutor: “Name three prominent conservatives who were advancing the birther issue.”

With this reply, Hannity accepted the charge that the whole subject is “racist,” and the argument that this “racist” subject is also baseless. It was the last straw.

Which means what exactly? Nothing. Hannity is right. Aside from Alan Keyes, a former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. and a Republican candidate for the Senate and the presidency, no prominent Republican – from John McCain to Mitt Romney to John Boehner to Ron Paul – and no prominent conservative, from William Bennett to Sarah Palin to Rudy Giuliani, ever faced or raised the issue.

Similarly, no think tank, no committee in Congress, no judicial body, no civic group and no mainstream media organization has advanced any responsible inquiry into these troubling questions. And forget about the Electoral College.

We’re supposed to pretend the questions don’t exist, that the dodgy doc floating on the White House website is the real deal – and I haven’t even mentioned other discrepancies in the Obama narrative. Silence, the conventional wisdom tells us, combats racism.

What chance does any free society in such deep denial have to continue? Not much. How tragic and frightening to realize that this same denial is evidence that our attachment to freedom and the Constitution vanished long ago.

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h/t birtherreport dot com