Birther Control

Honorary Texan.  A good friend of mine from college and a native of Texas enjoys calling me that.  He once said, if I had not told him that I was originally from California then he would have just assumed that I was another southern boy like him and his friends.  I attended graduate school in Arlington and have been living in the Lone Star State for a little under four years now.  To hear that from someone who is fiercely loyal to a state that takes pride in something like this, I choked up a little.  I love living in Texas and I love the people.  This is why it is so aggravating when someone makes me lose faith in a state I refer to as home.  Who is the culprit that is making every Texan look like a backwards dumbass?  This person is State Representative Bill Zedler (R-Arlington).  What did he do which is so aggravating and an embarrassment to the entire state?  He introduced a bill on January 23^rd.  No big deal, right?  Wrong.  Wrong.

H.B. 650 states that in order to be placed on the ballot in Texas to run for President and Vice President of the United States, they must provide the Texas Secretary of State with a birth certificate from the original issuing authority and proof of residence and this will be a public record.  Wow.  Just when you thought all the birther nonsense was over and we could all return to normalcy.  The more things change the more they stay the same.  Let me Tarantino this by starting from the end and working my way backwards.  The birther movement and this bill are racist.  Nothing more.  At this point you must be rolling your eyes but deep down inside, you know I am right.  Zedler is a Tea party politician and they seem to be the only ones keeping this idea alive.  Naturally, most Democratic Party members and Progressive groups in Texas and around the nation are outraged at this, but, it is interesting to note that even most moderate Republicans are shocked at this as well.  The general consensus is Bill is a day late and a dollar short.  Bill states, “I think there is a minimum standard of information that ought to be required of all candidates”.  All candidates?   Really?  If it is for all candidates then why does this only pertain to people running for President and Vice President of the United States and not every candidate in Texas? 

Zedler has assured us this bill has nothing to do with Obama but he did introduce this bill two days after the Presidential Inauguration.  Ah Ha! A Clue!  This whole movement came about because of the election of the first African American President.  It was never an issue before Obama and he is the only one it was aimed at.  No one was demanding to see the birth certificate of John McCain in 2008 or after.  I can feel people screaming at their screens right now.  Why would they check his birth certificate?  John’s a war hero who would probably bleed on the flag to ensure that those stripes stay red, but, he was not born in the United States.  That’s true; I did not just pull this fact out of my ass.  His parents were American citizens and he was born on a U.S. military base in the Panama Canal Zone.  Military bases in foreign countries are not considered sovereign U.S. soil.  McCain is an American citizen because his parents were and I do not doubt his citizenship or his devotion to his country.  My point is why is his citizenship more sacred than the Presidents?  What is the primary difference between McCain and Obama?  Is it because one is a Republican and the other is a Democrat?  This is doubtful and the fact that it has been definitively proven that Obama was born in America just makes it seem like this is about race. 

Many republicans and tea party politicians are trying to change the game so they win more elections.  Gerrymandering did not work and now they are trying to introduce new state laws that would award electoral votes based on congressional district results and not majority votes.  Do people really think that candidates for President are not vetted and determined if they are American Citizens?  Candidates for national office are constantly vetted by the FBI, other government agencies, and private citizens working on campaigns to find anything that would disqualify them from office.  This is the greatest country on Earth and there are ways of keeping just anybody from running for President. 

Zedler has said this bill is not about Obama, but, this would not be the first time he has not been honest.  This bill is pointless and just provides another layer of unnecessary government bureaucratic red tape.  I thought the point of the Republicans and the Tea party was to keep these kinds of intrusive government laws from happening, but, I guess I am wrong.  This bill would provide politicians with ammunition to hurt their opponents.  If you oppose this bill then what are you hiding?  Why won’t you turn over these documents if you are an American citizen?  I doubt this bill will pass and if it does than in the future there will be a Supreme Court decision overturning this law.  In the meantime, this bill harms candidates and pushes Texas even close to turning into a blue state in 2016.  What this bill really does is address certain groups of people who may want to run for office and tells them no matter how much you accomplish or how high you ascend, you will never be accepted.  You will never be one of us. 

Too soon to discuss unless your plan is to do nothing at all.

I had awoken early this morning because I had so little to do and so much time to get it done.  Wait a damn minute, scratch that and reverse it.  Much better.  My plan was to eat a healthy breakfast and exercise without feeling rushed.  I do not like to be rushed in the morning, so that means I have to wake up early or shelve my entire day.  What the hell, I’ll get all the sleep I need when I am riding the midnight train to slab city.  Today was an important day because it was the second inauguration of President Barack Obama.  I made sure to get my morning routine fully completed before the President was publicly sworn in so I could watch history being made and get my work done for the day at the same time.  Multitasking is a big part of life and the most successful people are the ones who can walk and chew gum at the same time.  This was a big day in history, beyond the obvious.  President Obama is the third consecutive President to be sworn in to a second term.  The only other time in history this has occurred is with the successive presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.  I mention this because there will be a quiz afterwards.

Today also happens to be Martin Luther King Jr. Day.  Today is a milestone day in history and this fact was not lost on me.  Nor did it appear to be lost on the President.  He choked up at the start of the oath of office and it was clear that the full magnitude of the moment had just hit him. His inauguration speech was a mix of solemnity and hope.  Change and Hope are no longer the watch words of this President, but, they are there.  They are underneath the surface but still the driving force of his agenda.  His speech talked about the progress we had made as a country and the progress we still need to make.  It was fitting for this day because it echoed the legacy of Dr. King, that we still have a ways to go but we can get there.  United we are stronger than divided and that if the lowest of us succeeds then we all succeed.  Out of many, one.  It was a king hell bastard of a speech. 

During the speech, the President discussed a recent event which shocked and outraged the entire nation and has brought forth more public discourse than any other event in recent history.  The President discussed the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14^th of last year.  Jesus.  Was it really just over a month ago that this happened?  The magnitude of what happened and the aftermath feels like it was much longer.  We’ve all heard how this individual (who shall rename nameless) killed his mother as she slept, then proceeded to the elementary school with an assault rifle and two pistols, and murdered 26 people before ending his own life.  The events that transpired are known to everyone and are too horrifying for me to recount in a detailed basis.  Besides, that is not the point.  The point is that this is now part of our political and societal discourse.  It has become the primary domestic policy issue for the Obama administration and will be outlined in his State of the Union address, according to more knowledgeable people than myself.  The problem with this point is at first, many people refused to discuss it because it was too soon.  What followed was even worse.  We can no longer have a discussion in this country without people harassing others or without threatening violence themselves. 

I have no desire to state my opinion on the events that transpired.  What I wish to convey is that we have not had a sane, logical discussion about options.  The public discourse on this tragedy ranges from logical to insane.  We can have discussions about public health, the state of mental healthcare in this country, and the influence of media and violent video games in our culture, but, when the topic moves to guns and gun control, look out!  You cannot utter the phrase gun control without being shouted down as a leftist pansy that should go back to Nazi Germany.  There has not been a debate about guns in our culture because one side is adamantly opposed to the idea of gun control.  It is very hard to have a debate when one side is constantly accusing the other of using the graves of dead children as a political tool.  Both sides use this tactic but it seems to be alright on one side if they are using it to destroy any conversation about gun control. 

Last Tuesday, the President outlined a series of proposals given to him by an advisory council, headed by Vice President Biden, on gun control.  The idea was to put forth reasonable steps that that can be taken to reduce gun violence in America.  The proposals ranged from executive actions the president can do on his own to actions that Congress would need to create legislation for.  The top three things the President proposed:

1.       Universal background checks on all gun sales

2.      Ban on high capacity magazines

3.      Congressional reinstatement of the assault weapons ban.

With these proposals, people went ape shit.  The sale of assault weapons has skyrocketed and try finding ammunition anywhere now.  Gun sales in general are up because nuts jobs like Alex Jones and the NRA are screaming that King Obama is going to try and take away all of your guns.  Obama is being referred to as a tyrant and that we all need to stand up to him and his army because they will take our guns.  The biggest supporters of our military and who proudly flash their bumper stickers to prove it are also the people who believe we need to be armed to kill them when they turn on us.  People have also been going on television and spouting historical revisionist nonsense such as, if Jews in the Ghettos had guns then would the Holocaust have happened?  I have several questions related to these statements:

1.       Who believes that we should not have background checks for all gun sales?

2.      How is the President a tyrant when one of his proposals is politely asking this country’s legislative body to pass a law?

3.      If it took the collective militaries of the world and six years of warfare to stop Hitler then what chance would a small minority of Jews had if they were armed?

4.      If our government and military declares war on its citizens and moves in to disarm us, what tactical advantage does your AR-15 assault rifle have against an Apache helicopter or a Predator Drone armed with hellfire missiles?

None of this makes sense.  We cannot have a polite and logical discussion on the topic.  The bottom line is that we no longer trust each other.  Today, the President put it eloquently when he stated, “Our journey is not complete”.  The President was talking about protecting our citizens from gun violence on a day commemorating the life and work of Dr. King, who died before he saw the completion of his journey more than forty years ago.  How much longer do we have to wait?

I just fed my dogs dinner and it is making my stomach grumble.  I am thinking about dinner while I am trying to think of an ending for this piece.  I have been staring at my computer for the last hour trying to think of a suitable ending, but, I am failing.  Maybe this is too big and too complex for me to finish alone.  I will let the last great American poet finish this for me.  He penned this more than thirty years ago.   The population numbers are dated but what he wrote will outlive all of us:

“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and admit it-that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable”.  –Hunter Thompson, 1973.