If he was born in Kenya and if he had acknowledged that from the start, it would have been a political liability, which yes, Cruz will experience if he runs.

If he lied about his birthplace, it was to avoid that liability and not to validate the legality of his candidacy. I do not know the truth. With a gun to my head I would probably pick Hawaii.

Would Obama lie? Of course I believe he would. All politicians lie, but usually not when the truth serves the purpose better.

IF he was born in Kenya, it is believable that Obama might claim Hawaii as his birthplace if he was convinced it would go unproven/unchallenged or if he were convinced that lacking proof, any challenge would be seen as a right wing attack.

I am not saying he did that. I guess it depends on how he thought being born in Kenya (if he was born in Kenya) would play with the voters. It certainly would not swing my vote either way.

Not all of them do it. George McGovern and Spiro Agnew were both genuine war heroes, and neither brought it up to build himself up in a campaign.

But for the most part, they can’t resist it. I do believe anyone who feels the urge to run for public office suffers from some kind of pathology. At least, these days.

It’s funny, the ancient Athenians had nothing but contempt for people who made no effort to involve themselves in politics and civic affairs, they called them “idiotoi”, (“self-persons”)from which we derive our word “idiot”. They felt it was the duty of every citizen, particularly a prosperous one, to involve himself in government, just as he was expected to buy weapons and horses and serve in the army or marines and defend the state. Even the impoverished were expected to vote at the assembly, and pull an oar in a war galley if they couldn’t afford armour.

Basically, the embellishment is all there was to it.

And it was the only point I tried to make back then: that Obama had cooked his own biography for his benefit, and this should be kept in mind. And yeah, he’s not alone among politicians in that department. Or a lot of other people.

But back then I watched liberals here spew their guts out like sea cucumbers trying to evade that simple fact. That comment you just made would have shortened some threads considerably.

But that’s political behavior. Marco Rubio bragged how his father was a “fugitive from Communist tyranny”, when it turned out he had left Cuba years before Castro took power.

After all, no one really knows for sure where he was born. We don’t remember, and we had nothing to do with it anyway. We can take neither credit nor blame for it.

There was a lot of hysteria about that on the board about a year ago, with the usual ink-squirters stubbornly ignoring the multiple reasons this could not have been the “random accidental typo” it was claimed to be. As I recall, there were ducks a-plenty by the ends of those threads.

No, the real issue with Obama was that his opponents wanted no part of him, no way, period. The foreign-born indignancy was the easiest way to get rid of him without having to go through the embarassment, inconvenience and trouble of an election. And when it didn’t work, it was the easiest way to make him look illegal, illegitimate and an outsider. They also threw UnAmerican. Socialist, Makaka, and Muslim into the pot, too.

A run for POTUS by Cruz would be the first by an undisputed foreign-born American with one foreign parent. This time there can be no so-called controversy, he’s already confessed. He actually is what they accused Obama of being.

But I have a feeling that won’t bother his followers in the least, in spite of the stink they raised about Obama for the exact same crime. Cruz may be Cuban-Canook, but at least he’s white, he can deliver Texas, and there’s a chance some Cubans in Miami might actually vote for him.

In other words, had Obama acknowledged that he was born in Kenya, he would still qualify but since no foreign born person has ever been POTUS, it would have been a political liability (at least equal to being Catholic) and the question of why he had originally claimed to have been born in the USA would have been a talking point.

But even if that is the case and Mr Cruz is eligible, then why wouldn’t Mr Obama be eligible, even if he was born in a foreign country?