Cedar Park Dad wrote:The Annoyed Man wrote:I just want to see his academic records. GW Bush showed us his.....and they were slightly better than John Kerry's......and John Kerry showed us his. Pretty much every president until this one has been pretty transparent with his educational background. But not this one. Why does he work SO hard to bury his personal history?
Its irrelevant. There was no requirement for disclosure. How many Presidents have done so? But it doesn't matter. They could have been all Fs, but he was elected.
No, there is no constitutional requirement for a president to make his/her educational background public. BUT.... it is a VERY public office. Presidential families certainly deserve privacy in the private part of the White House; but usually, by the time someone has campaigned for and attained the presidency, we know a LOT about them. This was not true of Obama. He had served Just 2 years of a 6 year term in national office before he ran for POTUS. He had little or no other national exposure before being Senator. The bulk of American voters would not have been aware of his Illinois Legislature performance or his part in Chicago's political machine because it isn't national news. And as a Senator, he was the
Junior Senator, and not really a democratic party leader.
Balanced against that, historically, Americans have wanted to know everything they can about the closest thing we have to royalty in this country. When past presidents were asked about their educations, it was already public knowledge......Eisenhower, for example.......or like Bush or candidate Kerry, they freely shared the information. Obama is the
only president in American history to actively resist the discovery of his academic pertinents. Past presidents or presidential candidates have been open about it, even when their GPA was less than perfect (again...Bush and Kerry as examples), because they've got nothing to hide. They are not ashamed of the record. Obama resolutely refuses to make his public. There are two possible (and plausible in the context of his known history) reasons that I can think of: 1) that his academic performance is so dismal that people would not have voted for him;
and/or 2) that his academic record contains a long history of serial fraud in academic financial matters like claiming to be foreign born to obtain favorable tuition rates (there seems to be some possibility of this latter item). So what you wind up with is a man who is somewhat of a cipher. And although the Constitution doesn't say that POTUS can't be a cipher, it makes many Americans—and not just a small fringe of us—exceedingly uncomfortable to have a president who so obviously and resolutely tries to bury his past. Exactly what is he hiding? You and I as individual Americans, "little guys", have some kind of expectation of privacy concerning our pasts. The narrow exceptions might include details of your past that a prospective employer might want to know about you..... what are your educational accomplishments.... what are your qualifications..... have you ever been convicted of a felony.... etc., etc., etc. But I submit that, for the man or woman aspiring to the highest office in the land, the arguably single most powerful person in the word, the person in command of the nation's strategic nuclear arsenal, that man or woman can no longer have the same expectation of privacy as you or I should have. Nor
should they.
THAT'S why it is relevant. Let's be honest. . . .if he had gotten all F's in school at all levels, he would never have made it to POTUS. I know it. You know it.
Cedar Park Dad wrote:The Annoyed Man wrote:Obama himself could have put the whole birther thing to rest back in 2008 just by producing a copy of his birth certificate. He didn't. He waited several years before producing a PDF copy of a certificate of live birth (a different type of document) with troubling characteristics in the file layers. Why didn't he just shut everybody up in the beginning by producing a hard copy of the actual birth certificate?
Because the idea is stupid and he played the conspiracy guys for chumps painting the whole Republican party with the nutso brush?
I'll debate the stupidity of the idea, but I think you're right about why he waited so long before responding.
Cedar Park Dad wrote:The Annoyed Man wrote:NOW..... I am not claiming that he is foreign born (and neither am I claiming that he isn't), but I AM claiming that he knowingly let the question fester for years, when he could have nipped it in the bud at the outset.
Why should he? 1) Again it makes the Republican party look like loons; 2) The conspiracacists are not going to be satisfied. As the 9/11 and Kennedy Assassination truthers have shown us, they can never be satisfied.
See, I'm a big believer in Occam's Razor, which when reduced to its shortest possible explanation says that the simplest answer is always the true answer. There are more complex ways of stating it, but that's the essential message of Occam's Razor. So, while Occam's Razor tends to disprove an Obama-citizenship conspiracy because it requires too many supporting theses to be true (the willful cooperation of Hawaii's governor being just
one of them, for instance) before the final conclusion can be true, Occam's Razor tends to
support the speculations about Obama's suppression of his academic record.
Cedar Park Dad wrote:The Annoyed Man wrote:IF he was born in Hawaii, then you have to ask, what is his motivation for letting it fester for so long? My guess is this: IF he was born in Hawaii, then he let it fester for so long because he knew that A) it would drive his opponents crazy, and B) in the process it would make them look a little moonbatty while he ends up looking like the reasonable one.
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Exactly.
Cedar Park Dad wrote:The Annoyed Man wrote:What's worse, consider this..... As bad as Obama is at POTUS, next in line for the "throne" is Joe Biden. Does anybody seriously want Biden in charge of anything bigger than a lawn mowing service? But Biden will be POTUS if Obama is removed from office.
Whats the joke about Biden being Obama's insurance policy against assassination?
Again...... Exactly.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
