Opinion

Ted Cruz isn't presidential material, but not because of where he was born

When I found out that Ted Cruz has his own birthers – that the eligibility of the Canadian-born candidate to become President of the United States is being contested in a “poorly written, 28-page complaint” – my first thought was, “It’s nice when two people find each other.”

I thought that 28 pages of rambling would, should contain some kind of right-wing treasure (like, at least one mention each of “chemtrails” and “purity of essence”) but, alas, Newton B Schwartz Sr, the 85-year-old Houston-based attorney who filed the suit against Cruz, appears to be a Democrat still grinding his teeth about the Obama birther non-conspiracy. And, in any case, he’s wrong about Cruz.

So the only thing left to do is have fun with this anyway. We’ve all earned it.

It’s easy to forget just how plain nutty and self-contradictory the original birther thing was. Building on the decades-long conceit that any Democratic defeat of a Republican presidential candidate must represent a fundamental thwarting of the will of the American people, it naturally followed that Barack Obama was not actually president at all.

The only logical solution, then, to the conundrum of his election, was that Obama, a man born in Hawaii to an American mother, just wasn’t American, period, and thus ineligible to serve as president. And while that theory allowed conservatives to engage in a lot of racialized “othering” of Barack Obama, a lot of it was just funny, because after agreeing that Obama wasn’t American, no one reading from The Manchurian Candidate For Toddlers could quite agree on how, precisely, the circumstances of his birth made him ineligible.

Supposedly, the president was really born in Kenya, so that automatically disqualified him. Although, just to be on the safe side, he supposedly also needed to have two naturalized parents to be considered American enough, which meant that just having a Kenyan father disqualified him. Someone even produced a fake birth certificate from 1961, showing Obama born in the Republic of Kenya three years before it was born.

Then, of course, the birthers claimed that his American short-form birth certificate was fake, so we needed to see the long-form one ... which we eventually did, and the birthers declared that it, too, must have been faked. Maricopa County, Arizona’s fascist sheriff dispatched a fact-finding mission to Hawaii and came up with a press release.

And then there appeared a series of Photoshopped birth certificates in which Barack Obama was allegedly originally named “Barry Soetero”, discovered by some of the same people who were convinced that Obama was born in Kenya, which made perfect sense, since a kid born in Kenya in 1961 would definitely have the last name of the Indonesian stepfather his mom didn’t meet until years later in Hawaii.

The eventual figurehead for all the birther nonsense was attorney Orly Taitz, who seemed like someone who tried to file suit at a dry cleaners and overall came off like a severely dehydrated Lady Gaga tanking an audition to play Natasha Fatale in between huffing a mixture of helium and nitrous oxide. (America in 2009 was not the best place, but at least it had this show going for it.)

Interestingly enough (as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted on Friday) it seems as if, in retrospect, the birther movement was following a goofy script designed to set someone like Ted Cruz up for failure in a quest for the presidency. In addition to Cruz actually being born outside of the United States – in the Canadian city of Calgary – all those imagined (and some perhaps less so) constitutional eligibility standards about a parent who was not a citizen or another parent who might have in some way renounced or suspended her citizenship actually describe Cruz’s family history far more than they ever did the Hawaiian-born Obama’s.

And most of Congress already hates Ted Cruz for his grandstanding, camera-hogging, obstreperous non-collegial ways, which is why so many Republican Party members seem to be having fun with his predicament.

Rand Paul suggested that Ted Cruz was absolutely qualified to become Prime Minister of Canada. Mike Huckabee is compelled and convinced! Arizona Senator John McCain, who had to fend off his own birther questions by pointing out that he was born on a US military base in Panama, has despised Cruz since the man’s early days in the Senate, when Cruz implied that McCain buddy Chuck Hagelmight have accepted money from North Korea. McCain was probably rolling the words around his mouth like they were stolen sweets when he told a radio host that he “didn’t know the answer” as to whether Cruz was eligible to be president.

Meanwhile, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who probably wishes Ted Cruz would go try to make toaster strudel in a full bathtub, initially refused to comment definitively on his eligibility, stating, “I’ll let all these folks argue about this stuff, and I’m going to stay out of it.”

Now, there’s a school of thought that people shouldn’t be enjoying this newest strain of birtherism; that, after deploring the conduct of conservatives asserting Obama’s illegitimacy, teasing and tweaking the Cruz birther phenomenon only retroactively legitimizes what was clearly a broadly racist movement to undo the Obama presidency without having to count actual votes.

But that generous impulse conflates two distinct issues. Obama birtherism was the result of a lot of people who refused to recognize a lawfully elected public official because of what he looked like or the theory of government he espoused. It was a malignant extension of a frame of thought that says certain people are not allowed power over “Americans”.

Cruz birtherism is just trolling an unbearable prick.

It’s doubtful that any non-crazy people truly believe that Ted Cruz is disqualified to become president. Even the person pushing that narrative now the most (and who once himself rode the tide of Obama birther sentiment), Donald Trump, likely doesn’t believe a word of it. Trump, after all, is an opportunist who will believe whatever closes the deal.

Cruz birtherism is a fake issue that couldn’t find a better target: a Princeton and Harvard educated white-shoe litigator married to a Goldman Sachs executive who likes to fire weapons covered in bacon and LARP as a good ol’ boy with that Duck Dynasty yahoo, who clerked for the US supreme court but acts as if the NRA’s faux-academic flunkies are the last word on Second Amendment jurisprudence, who paraphrases Molon Labe in fundraising emails and pretends that the president will confiscate all our guns and who studied American history and yet claims with a straight face that Barack Obama is the most left-wing president in history.

The Ted Cruz birther conspiracy is a fatuous gimmick, but, come on, so is the candidate. It’s nice when these people find each other.