Via Billmon’s tweetstream, the National Memo highlights a strong contender for Charlie Pierce’s “Royal Regent of the Crazy People” award:
Florida congressman Ted Yoho (R) was a relatively unheard-of veterinarian – that is, until he became one of the biggest upset winners of the 2012 election and landed a seat in Washington.
Recently Representative Yoho has garnered widespread attention for his support of Rep. Steve Stockman’s (R-TX) possible “birther” legislation.
The legislation would launch an investigation into President Barack Obama’s birth certificate, which Stockman claims will prove that Obama was not born in the United States, and thus force the president out of office. The birther legislation has now expanded to include an investigation into Obama’s “real” biological mother, who they claim is not actually Stanley Ann Dunham, but wanted terrorist Elizabeth Ann Duke.
Not that any of this matters, because as the son of any American citizen, Obama would still qualify to serve as president of the United States. But Yoho does not really care. He hopped on to the crazy train a long time ago, and time is proving that he has no intentions of hopping off….
Besides the usual mockery, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
max
IMPEACH! IMPEACH! You know you guys want to! Suck it the fuck up and do it so we can have ALL THE KLOWN KARS!
max
[‘Made in the USA!’]
eemom
Any relation to YOLO?
Villago Delenda Est
I knew that “mainstreaming” the mentally ill by tossing them out of their institutions during the Reagan administration was a mistake, but now I think it was a deliberate move on the part of the Reagan cabal to get these people involved in Rethuglican politics.
RepubAnon
Perhaps they could get Ted Cruz as a co-sponsor? He’d be happy to help establish that someone born in a foreign country (such as Canada) would not be Constitutionally permitted to be President…
(Chuckle)
BGinCHI
These geniuses need to run for President and ask these patriotic questions for all the voters to hear.
Stockman/Yoho 2016!
soprano2
Just when you think they can’t get any crazier, along comes one like this. They make the Clinton haters look sane.
kc
I hate these people.
MattR
There is no birther legislation. Never will be. All there is are rumors on birther sites that are spread with blind optimism by other birthers. The only question is why the posters of such rumors are spreading them. It is possible that they truly think that these Congressmen are going to take action, but it is much more likely that they are knowingly exaggerating things in order to keep their moronic birther readers coming back for more
somethingblue
That somebody like this is in Congress I accept as just par for the course these days, but I find it worrying that he ever had anything to do with animals.
liberal
Anyone know what happened with Higgs Bosons Mate?
MoeLarryAndJesus
They just keep getting dumber and crazier.
What’s next?
dmsilev
I assume that birthers fall into the same general categories as goldbugs: Some true believers, leavened by a bunch of grifters who regard the true believers as convenient suckers.
Yatsuno
Yum! Moar juicy birfer goodness! Orly haz never been happier!
raven
@liberal: Yes, he was helped by a person here who lived near him.
? Martin
This guy sounds like one of us:
Baud
@raven:
Excellent.
dmsilev
@MoeLarryAndJesus: I think some nut or another claimed that there was evidence that Malcolm X was Barack Obama’s father. It’s going to be hard to top that. (thinks) Aha! At the end of WWII, the Soviets captured Adolf Hitler and froze some of his semen. Top Soviet scientists manipulated the DNA to make it appear ‘black’, after which sleeper agents secretly impregnated Obama’s innocent mother with the frozen Hitlerseed.
And the rest was history.
Villago Delenda Est
@soprano2:
Clinton was only an evil socialist.
Obama is an evil ni*CLANG* socialist.
We’re cranking up the crazy to 11, and beyond.
the Conster
Who could’ve predicted Yolo would be from Florida?
My second day finished at my new job – it’s a good thing. They offer so many benefits it’s like being in a candy store, and everyone is wicked smart and nice. Yay me!
Amir Khalid
@liberal:
He’s safe. Commenter Mary G says she picked him up, and he’s at her place as of the weekend.
Villago Delenda Est
@dmsilev:
Don’t give them ideas like that. You run it up the flagpole, and we’ll be deafened by the shouts of “Sieg Heil!”
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
I have far too much loathing for the GOP to let them off the hook so easily as to assume that they’re actually mentally ill and therefore not responsible for their actions.
Steeplejack
@liberal:
Latest known update here.
Kay
More birther crazy for the historical record.
Our grandkids are going to read about this. I’m hoping someone great does a documentary. News clips galore.
It’ll be one of those humiliating historical blips: “people went crazy when…”
“My grandad was a birther…”
RSR
So, we went on vacation, and my nine year old son fell off his cousin’s bed (horseplay!) and broke his arm! Humerus, but not humorous.
The good news is that the orthopedist at CHOP said it’s a very clean break, and so close to the shoulder that he won’t even cast it. It did not involve the growth plate, which might have required surgery for the little guy.
Steeplejack
@dmsilev:
“Hitlerseed”: another great band name from the Balloon Juice megamind.
Yatsuno
@max: The funny thing is the number of impeachers who think that if Obama is booted from office that overturns the election as well. Does. Not. Work. Like. That. Then you say President Biden and they get all cornfuzzled when you aren’t saying President Willard.
dmsilev
@Villago Delenda Est: I wonder if I could get a Regnery book deal.
I’d probably get sued by the estate of Robert Ludlum though.
IowaOldLady
It’s very disillusioning to realize how stupid and/or crazy and/or evil a significant number of congress people are. Do you think they beat the general average?
bemused
Oh man, he’s a veterinarian…can’t imagine taking my pets to him for care. Then again, we did use a husband/wife vet team until we found out they were creationists after he wrote some letters to local paper.
This is the yahoo who said the tanning tax is racist because it only applies to white people which is actually hilarious in a way considering he’s talking about white people wanting to become browner.
Amir Khalid
@Yatsuno:
This was why Democrats never considered impeaching George Walker Bush, wasn’t it — the prospect of President Cheney?
Baud
@Amir Khalid:
If they had had the will to impeach Bush, Cheney would not have been far behind. We never would have gotten the votes in the Senate, however.
Soonergrunt
The funniest thing about the birthers is that they honestly think that if they found the holy grail–proof that the President was not a natural born US citizen, that it would actually matter.
There’s only one method under the constitution to remove a sitting President from office. Conviction by the US Senate after impeachment by the House.
MazeDancer
@liberal:
Check Betty Cracker’s “open window” thread for good news. Steeplejack reported Mary G rescued Higgs Boson’s Mate.
The Dangerman
@Baud:
I wonder what POS Cheney would have chosen for his VP as Impeachment Insurance. Maybe John Bolton.
sharl
BOLO alert for jeffreyw:
Mike in NC
Our wingnut state senator is also a veterinarian. I figured he got bored with castrating dogs and cats and decided it would be more fun hurting people.
Baud
@The Dangerman:
I think appointed VPs have to be confirmed by Congress, so Cheney would have been SOL.
Alison
So in the Newsmax box there’s a link that says “Poll: Hillary Least Desired Democratic Nominee”. Not clicking because yeah right, but I’m curious what they mean. Is some pollster actually claiming she’s the nominee Dems least want to run? Or that she’s the least desired *opponent* for whatever GOP fuckface gets served up? The latter would make sense, at least…
imonlylurking
@raven: Good. I was also worrying about him.
Chris
@Amir Khalid:
For all the influence he had on Bush during the first five years of the war on terror, Cheney might as well have been president already.
Nah. I think it’s partly the fear of backlash, partly the fear that tying up the government in impeachment would make it impossible to focus on actually passing things (like HCR), but also, more practically, the fact that so many Democrats were complicit in all of Bush’s crimes (supporting the Iraq war, supporting the Patriot Act, etc) and so aren’t about the support the impeachment of anyone for said crimes – it’d be admitting that they, too, belong in jail.
Jay C
@RSR:
I assume “CHOP” is some sort of healthcare facility? If so, they should really consider a better acronym….
Hope the kid comes though OK….
BillinGlendaleCA
@eemom: No, that’s a California county, west of Sac-Town.
The Other Chuck
Please proceed, congressman.
Patricia Kayden
@max: Wow. The stupid burns. Repubs have long jumped over the shark. Hope they never get another President elected from their ranks.
Soonergrunt
@Baud:
The VP must be confirmed by the Congress when the President nominates a person to that office in the case that the Vice Presidency becomes open. Amend XXV, Sec. 2:
I can’t imagine John Bolton being confirmed by both houses to the Vice Presidency. Hell, I can’t imagine him being confirmed by both houses to Deputy Special Assistant to the Dog Walker.
Patricia Kayden
@? Martin: Well luckily for him, he won’t have to vote for Obama when he runs in 2016.
Oh wait…
Patricia Kayden
@dmsilev: But then President Obama would be American as both parents would have been US citizens. Not seeing how that would help the birther crazies.
kc
@Steeplejack:
Geez, just read all that. So glad he’s okay. And FSM bless MaryG
Hal
I always wonder what birther theory says regarding this little factoid. How do they get around the fact that Obama’s mother is a US Citizen and it doesn’t matter where he was born?
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
To an important right wing constituency, proving that Obama was Hitler’s child would increase his popularity.
Kay
Remember the lady with the birth certificate in a baggy?
I wonder how she’s doing, 4 years later.
She couldn’t maintain that level of anger and still function.
MattR
@Hal: That is just one of the reasons why Ted Cruz’s presidential run will be so much fun.
Roger Moore
@bemused:
Wayne Allard was my family’s vet when I was growing up. I thought it was kind of cool that the family vet was now a Senator, until I got old enough to understand his politics.
Kay
@Hal:
There’s 2 theories.One is that she was underage and the other has to do with Hawaii statehood. Those 2 might be combined.
Roger Moore
@The Dangerman:
Whoever it was, they would have had to be confirmed by the same House and Senate that had just tossed Georgie. GLWT.
trollhattan
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Home of the fightin’…whatever the hell the UC Davis team is called. Should be the fightin’ Corked Cows.
Will have to see this, because of who’s in it, but it will be bittersweet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubKro7V05Ts
ruviana
@trollhattan: Aggies, of course. UC Santa Cruz is the Banana Slugs.
Belafon
@Baud: Yes, they do. Remember what it took for Joan Allen to be confirmed VP.
lojasmo
@Jay C:
Children’s Hospital of Pennsylvania.
Snarkworth
Not that any of this matters, because as the son of any American citizen, Obama would still qualify to serve as president of the United States.
No, that might make you a citizen, but not eligible to be president. You have to be born on US soil to be president. Thus, Obama is eligible. Ted Cruz is not.
WereBear
New favorite band name.
dmsilev
@Hal: It’s complicated, but they basically claim that she didn’t spend enough time as an adult within the borders of the US for her children to “count” as natural born, based on some bizarre reading of an obsolete and no-longer-in-force law.
BillinGlendaleCA
@ruviana: Santa Barbara’s the Gaucho’s and Irvine’s the Anteaters, ZOT.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
So let’s get this straight; the birther’s are against Obama because his dad was Indonesian, however Ted Cruz, who’se dad is Cuban and who was born in Canada AKA Soviet Socialist Republic of North America is ok to them?
Ted & Hellen
Can one of the Resident Emeritus Botsplainers please illuminate for us all why BO has sent these two douchebags as his official representatives to Egypt?
Nothing like conferring extra legitimacy on people who oppose one’s agenda almost every step of the way.
What? Is there not ONE qualified Dem who could have done the job? He had to send these two assholes?
Hmmm…
Belafon
@Snarkworth: Love it when people come in here and don’t know this stuff. If this were true, John McCain would have been ineligible to be president. Being born on US soil is one way, but if one of your parents is American, you are American as well. You can also be born on a US base or embassy overseas and it qualifies.
Ted & Hellen
It’d be cool if Obama turned out NOT to be a U.S. citizen or whatever…just to see all the right heads explode.
On both sides of the tribal divide.
Perhaps then the few of us left behind could shovel up the splattered brains, eyeballs, and skull fragments and start anew…
WereBear
The Republicans ran McCain, born in Panama. Just sayin’
Snarkworth
@Belafon:
Being American isn’t enough.
McCain was born in the Canal Zone, which (with a bit of tweaking) is U.S. soil.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Snarkworth: No, that might make you a citizen, but not eligible to be president. You have to be born on US soil to be president. Thus, Obama is eligible. Ted Cruz is not. Remember John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone?
Roger Moore
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
FTFY.
liberal
@raven:
Right…found that out by reading other BJ threads on my Samsung Galaxy S4 while sitting in an Applebee’s.
Origuy
@Snarkworth: And George Romney (Mitt’s dad) was born in Mexico. The Constitution says a “natural-born citizen”. The Supremes have never ruled directly on this phrase, but it is usually understood to mean born a citizen. If you are born overseas to American parents, you are a citizen from birth. You do not have to be naturalized.
Edit: I would have said “an American parent”, but that hasn’t always been true.
Another Holocene Human
@? Martin: Hoarder.
Feces in buckets. Junk on lawn.
They should have sent in APS, social workers, but there’s no money for that so instead they send the sheriff, this dude couldn’t deal with the stress of losing what little he had. It was wrong but this kind of stuff happens when you push people over the edge. You can be safe or self-righteous but not both.
liberal
@RSR:
As my brother-in-law put it, when you have kids, you don’t take vacations. You take trips.
MomSense
@Alison:
Something tells me those Newsmax readers are not very bright, paranoid, and have lots of health problems. Yesterday it was cinnamon will fight high cholesterol and 5 foods guaranteed to jump start your metabolism. Today it is 3 foods that will burn belly fat and the healing powers of vinegar.
Get them some Obamacare, stat!
Snarkworth
@Origuy:
You may be right, but the “usually understood” part is subject to political/hysterical/racial interpretation.
Even if he was born on Mars, Obama had one citizen parent. Same number as Cruz.
Snarkworth
@Origuy:
You may be right, but “usually understood” is subject to political/cultural/racial interpretation. It wasn’t such a big deal when the elder Romney ran.
If this is the rule, Obama could have been born on Mars and, with an American mother, been eligible.
Another Holocene Human
Re: Yoho, just recall, this is rootin’ tootin’ North Central Florida Tea-Bag Central (sweet tea, hon, extra sugar), gerrymandered up for extra whiteness of electorate (or, you know, redness, because the sun is fierce out here).
All Yoho pretty much had to run on was Obummer’s gon’ take ‘way yer guuuuuunzzz (and oh yeah, the sheriff is near). We had a sane person running but no money from Florida Democratic Party, AFL-CIO, or online progressives. JR was a trooper. There are Democrats out in the rural areas. It just takes a lot of time and, heck, money to reach people who are scattered all over like that.
Trust me, Yoho got plenty of PAC money. All he has to do is throw red meat at the goobers (hell, he is one, absolutely no doubt according to those that know him well) and keep voting the Koch line.
Snarkworth
Apologies for the double/triple posts. Darn technology.
catclub
@Chris: “the fact that so many Democrats were complicit in all of Bush’s crimes”
This combined with the gatherings from the NSA to be used by Cheney in extremis. There was some event with Jane Harmon (defense or intelligence high ranking member) that clicked for me on how they were likely to be using NSA surveillance.
Yatsuno
@Snarkworth: This is why we say FYWP early and often. Even if the problem is your computer/connection, it is always FYWP.
Matt McIrvin
@Hal: Actually, it arguably does matter where he was born, because of an obscure loophole in the citizenship law in effect in 1961. For a US-citizen mother legally married to a foreign-national father, there was a residency requirement for automatic child citizenship: she had to have been resident in the US for five years after the age of 14. But since Ann Dunham was under 19 years old, that wasn’t possible.
Now, first, it’s quite possible that an objection on these grounds would not have stood up in court, since penalizing people for having young mothers was obviously not the intent of the law. Second, since his father had another wife, it could be argued that the marriage was invalid, in which case he would get automatic citizenship through his mother.
And in reality as opposed to crazytown, this is all moot because Obama was obviously born in Hawaii.
But it’s possible to make a non-crazy case that it does matter where he was born.
On the other hand, if Elizabeth Ann Duke were his real mother, he’d get automatic citizenship from her with no trouble! I’ve also heard birthers ranting about the secret of his illegitimate birth, not realizing that that would actually make him a natural-born citizen regardless of birthplace. These people can’t even concoct arguments that don’t cancel each other out.
Matt McIrvin
Here’s a document from the Congressional Research Service (PDF) giving more information than you could ever possibly want about the “natural-born citizen” clause and related matters, including the stupidity of the claims that “natural-born citizenship” is somehow different from citizenship-at-birth, and why objections to McCain’s natural-born citizenship have tended to be laughed out of court. I actually learned about the hairy situation described above from a footnote in this paper.
SiubhanDuinne
@Roger Moore: Sonny Perdue, former Governor of Georgia, was also a vet.
Matt McIrvin
…Something that the CRS document also stresses is that the legal presumption in cases like these is of eligibility to hold political office. The burden of proof is entirely on the person asserting that somebody isn’t eligible.
(And, no, you are not required to be born on US soil to be president. According to all the non-crazy case law on this, “natural-born” means a citizen by reason of birth, however that happened. Birthplace only matters in Obama’s case because of convoluted special circumstances. McCain’s case is also a little unusual because, in an effort to clarify the law, he and others in his situation were retroactively declared to be citizens by reason of birth slightly after he was born, but Congress actually has the power to do that.)
Roger Moore
@catclub:
And the teensy little detail that they needed a 2/3 vote in the Senate to convict, which they had no chance in hell of getting, no matter what Bush did. Impeachment would have been nothing but a show, with no real chance of any good outcome and several possible bad ones. Taking impeachment off the table was a recognition of political reality.
Anne Laurie
@SiubhanDuinne: I think some vets fall into the same “I’m so smart, I must know EVERYTHING” self-delusion as doctors. And vets have an added (dis)advantage in that they literally have patients who can’t talk back — and who’ll be ‘put to sleep’ if they get too unruly.
Maybe pushing dumb animals around is a natural preparation for being a Republican legislator…
pseudonymous in nc
@Snarkworth:
Any argument that there’s a third variety of citizen aside from “naturalized” and “not naturalized” is going to have to take it to SCOTUS, and it’d take some pretty hardcore activism to carve out a legal narrative that differentiates statutory jus sanguinis citizenship from constitutional jus soli citizenship. That’s going to require someone with standing, too.
That’s to say, if you can get a US passport with your birth certificate, the assumption is that you can become president; if you need a certificate of naturalization, not. (Even though that’s a stupid rule these days, and needs to be amended out, probably in a post-dated fashion, so no current pol with presidential aspirations is directly affected.)
Villago Delenda Est
@Belafon:
The Paulistas were making exactly that argument (McCain was born in PANAMA!) in 2008.
These people are not sane. Period.
Bob h
Yoho or Yobo?
sherparick
@Matt McIrvin: That’s because the real reason President Obama is not legitimate and is not one of “us” is because he is Black. Meanwhile Ted Cruz could be the spawn of Tralfamadorians, generated from a test tube on Alpha-Centauri, and perfectly eligible since he has the right Melanin content in his skin.
kd bart
This just proves that there is money to be made in “The Crazy”.
Nickws
@Matt McIrvin:
That only ever applied to US citizens who lived overseas as permanent residents of other countries, at time of giving birth; as you appear to note in one of you later paras in this post.
Your 2nd and 3rd sentences are as incorrect/irrelevant as the argument commenter Snarkworth was promoting up above (before he quite rightly dropped it.)
Matt McIrvin
@Nickws: Yes, well, we can always pile implausible counterfactuals on counterfactuals here; if Ann Dunham can secretly have a child in Kenya I suppose she can secretly be a permanent resident there too.
The main point is, jus soli citizenship is a much simpler thing in US law than citizenship-by-parenthood for kids with one citizen parent, especially with the legal situation of 50-odd years ago.
It’s not strictly true that every child of a citizen is automatically a citizen (just the vast majority of them), whereas the only exceptions to jus soli are much more oddball cases under the “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause, like children of foreign diplomats or the aftermath of an enemy invasion of the US. (I can see the seed of a new crazytown birther argument in the latter case, though it’s not one I’ve heard used.)