Commentary: Cruz gives ‘birthers’ a taste of their own medicine
When Barack Obama was running for president, rumors circulated on the Internet and Fox News that he was not really an American citizen.
Right-wing tea party adherents, for the most part, questioned Obama’s qualifications to be elected president and even denied the validity of Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate.
But the truth is that Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 — after it became a U.S. state — to a woman from Kansas and a father from Kenya. He is thus a citizen of this country and eligible to be president.
Obama’s 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), was born in Panama to American parents. His father was in the military and stationed at the time in the Canal Zone, a strip of territory then leased to the United States by Panama and returned to that nation by a 1979 treaty. Nobody has ever questioned McCain’s eligibility to be president, nor should they.
As we head into the 2016 election season, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican enthusiastically supported by the same tea party folks who questioned — and continue to do so today — Obama’s citizenship, has entered the presidential race.
Cruz was born in Canada. The senator’s father was a Cuban citizen, his mother was an American who had left this country to live in Canada, and the senator himself held dual (U.S. and Canadian) citizenship until just a few years ago.
If this isn’t hypocrisy, then I don’t know what is. The senator recently remarked that he came from Canada, a country known for tolerance and civility, and said he was grateful that his parents moved to America.
But take a look at the kind of people who support Cruz. He made his announcement at Liberty University in Virginia (established by Jerry Falwell), where the student body listened to the senator’s speech. They had to. It was that or pay a $10 fine.
California Gov. Jerry Brown said just the other day that this man is totally unfit to be president of the United States. I couldn’t agree more.
LENARD DAVIS lives in Newport Beach.