Tea Party Presidential Wanna-Be, Sen. Rafael Eduardo ‘Ted’ Cruz of Texas, Releases Scan of a Document Purported to Be His Birth Certificate

Texas Tea Party Sen. Ted Cruz signaled he is definitely running for president in 2016 by releasing his birth certificate this week. The scan he provided is posted above and, as you can see, it just seems fake, doesn’t it? The document purports that Cruz’s real name is not “Ted,” it’s Rafael Eduardo Cruz — the certificate says his middle name is “Edward,” but that was probably Photoshopped from Eduardo to make him sound more American. But the clincher is, it says he was born in Canada, which — for the benefit of any low-info Fox viewers who may read this — is a foreign country.

The document indicates that his mother was an American but that his father, Rafael Bienvenido Cruz, was a Cuban national. Because of this, the media is drawing parallels between Cruz’ citizenship status at birth and Pres. Obama’s. The president was also born in a foreign country — Hawaii — to an American mother and a non-American father. Barack Obama Sr. was a citizen of Kenya, which was then a British colony. One significant difference is that while Obama’s father has been accused of being “anti-colonial” (just like George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the first three U.S. presidents) Cruz’ father admits he fought for the communist dictator, Fidel Castro.

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Rove Delivers Keynote Speech at the California GOP Convention – Only to Have His Message Stepped on by Wingnut Leader’s Assertion That Pregnancies Resulting from Rapes Are Rare

Left: Rove address California GOP convention: ‘Get off your asses’; right: California Republican Assembly leader Celeste Greig, left, with Birth Queen Orly Taitz

The California Republican Party is bankrupt, both intellectually and financially. Its voter registration has dropped to just 30 percent of the electorate. And last year Republicans lost so many seats in the Legislature that Democrats achieved super-majority status in both houses.

“Granted, the percentage of pregnancies due to rape is small because it’s an act of violence, because the body is traumatized.”
– CRA President Celeste Greig

But hope springs eternal, as they say, and party leaders had pinned their hopes for reenergizing the faithful at their convention in Sacramento over the weekend with a rousing keynote address by Turdblossom himself, Karl Rove.

Channeling House Speaker John Boehner, who had the Beltway media clutching its collective pearls last week when he railed ungrammatically at the Senate to “get off their ass” and pass an anti-Sequester plan — even though the House has no viable plan on the table either — Rove rallied the 500 or so conventioneers with similar language.

“My message is this: get off your ass,” Rove said, during his keynote speech. “Get back in the game and fight. Don’t give in to what the other side wants.”

The flaw in that message, of course, is that the policies the “other side wants” — like a balanced approached to deficit reduction, gun safety measures and the rest — are also what majorities of voters want.

Rove recently launched the Conservative Victory Project, a PAC intended to drive tea-party and birther candidates and their ilk out of primary races, so it was delightfully paradoxical that his message was overshadowed in media coverage by Celeste Greig, the leader of the California Republican Assembly — a haven for tea partyists and birthers — who reasserted the Republicans’ magical thinking about “legitimate rape” and pregnancies in an interview with a reporter:

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Romney Releases ‘Certificate of Live Birth’ – What Is He Hiding?

scan-romney-certificate-live-birth

Birthers are adamant that certificates of live birth are not the same as birth certificates. Using their logic, the document Mitt Romney released yesterday is insufficient proof that he was born.

Many, many people believe Mitt Romney is a robot. If so, he would not have a birth certificate at all, would he?

What is Mitt Romney hiding?

And while the Romney campaign is at it, we also want proof that Ann Romney has no sister-wives.

Obama 2012 Campaign Lays Trap for Birthers, GOP

Pres. Obama's long-form birth certificate
Pres. Obama's long-form birth certificate
In reporting that Pres. Obama released his so-called long form birth certificate, Ben Smith at right-leaning Politico.com gives voice to the inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom that the president and his team bowed to pressure from birthers like Donald Trump:

Seeking to put an end to the “birther” conversation — and, incidentally, elevating Donald Trump on the day of his trip to New Hampshire — the White House says it has convinced the State of Hawaii to make an exception to state policy and release a copy of his long form birth certificate, the holy grail of obsessives.

It’s possible that Smith and some of his cohorts in the D.C. press corps actually believe that the White House was “seeking to end” the birther conspiracy, but it is highly unlikely that anyone in the White House political shop or the Obama 2012 campaign is that naive. For the sake of the future of our republic, let’s hope not.

A more realistic, albeit cynical, view is that the Obama campaign is using the controversy about the president’s birth certificate as a wedge issue — that the release of the document is intended to drive birthers batshit crazy, prompting them to escalate their conspiracy theorizing to new levels of absurdity — which in turn will force establishment Republican pols, including GOP presidential candidates, to take a position for or against a key segment of their wingnut base.

The Obama campaign is banking on the fact that the release of the long-form certificate will resolve any doubt about the president’s birth origins among level-headed swing voters. Settling the issue among independents, the constituency that will decide the presidential race in a close election, will put the eventual Republican nominee in an awkward position. He (or she) must have both the GOP’s wingnut base and sensible independents to win next year.

If you think the release of Obama’s birth certificate will put the controversy about his birth to rest, here are two words to consider: “grassy knoll.” Just take a gander at the comments on Ben Smith’s post at Politico. For every voice of reason from liberals, as shown in the first example, there are about two from birthers howling at the moon.

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