VAT? Anyone? SCOTUS? No? OK. (ap photo)
A New York Times/CBS News poll found 20 percent of Americans believe President Obama was born in another country, while 58 percent said he was born here — “here” being relative, since Beltway is not currently filing from Hawaii (though we should be).
The Times, ever intrepid and winsomely curious, called back some of these Americans to find out why they think the president was not born in America.
Tommy Barnett, 56, an independent of Cullman, Ala., said: “Somebody told me he’s not from here. I said I never heard of Barack Obama, that’s not American, then we find out he’s Muslim. What they got somebody like that running our country for?”
And:
Another poll respondent, Duane Rasmussen, a Republican from Reno, Nev., questioned the validity of Mr. Obama’s papers. “He has not produced a birth certificate from Hawaii,” Mr. Rasmussen said. “There were some pseudo-tries, and all of them have problems as birth certificates. They were not authentic. I believe he is a socialist.”
At the White House today, press secretary Robert Gibbs tried swatting away a bunch of rumors about Obama, reputed non-American Muslim, whose birth certificate is posted on the internet:
GIBBS: No, we have — the president has dealt with the crazy Internet rumors for — for years….
You know, again, I’ve said this many times. If you’re — if after I ask that the president’s birth certificate be put on the Internet hasn’t dissuaded you from where he was being born, I’m almost positive that — that no argument is somehow going to dissuade you from that.
I don’t — I’ve got to tell you, I don’t — we don’t spend a lot of time here worrying about what to do about people that don’t think the president was born here. I don’t — again, I’m the guy who said put the birth certificate on the Internet. It is — apparently, among those people, dissuaded virtually none of them.
