Republican Birther Gets Indicted on Fraud Charges and Blames President Obama

Here we have a fine example of modern day conservatives’ idea of “personal responsibility”.

The birther conspiracy artist and “author”, who humiliated Forbes by publishing a bit of Obama paranoia that strayed wildly from facts, known as Dinesh D’Souza has been indicted on fraud charges under federal campaign finance laws, after he allegedly funneled $20,000 to the Republican challenging Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) in 2012. He’s blaming President Obama.

Yep. D’Souza claims it’s all the President’s fault. His defense is that Obama is “targeting” him because he has said some really crazy things, according to the New York Times. It’s “political”:

Mr. Brafman (Benjamin Brafman, D’Souza’s lawyer) has filed court papers contending that the government “targeted” Mr. D’Souza “because of his consistently caustic and highly publicized criticism” of President Obama. The office of Preet Bharara, the United States attorney in Manhattan, declined to comment on the defense filing. But last week, it filed papers saying that a selective prosecution claim was “entirely without merit.”

Mr. Bharara’s office said Mr. D’Souza’s illegal conduct came to light as a result of a review by the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s New York office of campaign filings of both parties for the seat held by Senator Gillibrand, “rather than through any investigative focus on the defendant himself.”

Apparently “caustic ” is the new “total fabrication and paranoid rantings”. Mind you, this is the guy who called the President a “grown up Trayvon in the White House” so he’s clearly unable to think clearly due to frothing hatred. But here’s a bit of reality for the rest of you.

Insane Texas Tea Party Rep. Refuses To Acknowledge Obama’s Citizenship!

It was supposed to be a discussion about the latest, irresponsible, pointless threat from the Republican Party to bring the US economy crashing down unless the Democrats voted to defund the Affordable Healthcare Act (known as Obamacare). However, Chris Matthews interview with Tea Party Congressman Blake Farenthold (Rep., TX, 27th.) turned to the question of the eligibility of Senator Ted Cruz to run for president in 2016.

Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American mother and a Cuban father, is widely considered to meet the requirements of US citizenship as laid down by the Nationality Act of 1940, and Matthews himself was quick to say that as far as he is concerned Cruz is perfectly entitled to carry the Republican flag in 2016. When he asked Congressman Farenthold if he concurred, Farenthold replied that Cruz “is as eligible as Obama is. . . If he can be president, Ted Cruz can be president.”

Anyone watching or listening could of course see that the veil had been lifted. There was no way Matthews was going to let this one go. What followed was an almost farcical exchange as Congressman Farenthold refused point-blank, again and again, to not only confirm that he believed that President Obama was the legitimately elected president of the United States, but that he was a legitimate US citizen. While not directly or openly calling either of these issues into question, he dodged the matter again and again by claiming that since he was not a member of Congress at the time of the president’s election, he was not able to say whether he was a citizen, or whether his election to the White House was legitimate:

Matthews, clearly as frustrated as the rest of us by the obfuscation that has come to characterise so many in the Tea Party, eventually grew weary and told Farenthold “everybody watching knows what you’re doing.”

Barack Obama has had to put up with an extraordinary campaign of slander and innuendo since he was sworn in as president. Whether it’s accusations that he is a crypto-socialist, a secret Muslim, or not even an American, the sad reality seems to be that as long as the Tea Party and their like-minded friends are around, he will have to put up with it. However, Matthews was exactly right. Everybody knows what these guys are doing.

Canadian-born Ted Cruz says “facts are clear” he’s eligible to be president

Sen. Ted Cruz rejected questions Sunday over his eligibility to be president, saying that although he was born in Canada “the facts are clear” that he’s a U.S. citizen. “My mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She’s a U.S. citizen, so I’m a U.S. citizen by birth,” Cruz told ABC. “I’m not going to engage in a legal debate.” The Texas senator was born in Calgary, where his mother and father were working in the oil business. His father, Rafael Cruz, left Cuba in the 1950s to study at the University of Texas and subsequently became a naturalized citizen.

President Obama has been hounded by critics who contend he was born outside the U.S. and, therefore, ineligible to win the White House. Obama was born in Hawaii. But some Democratic critics have taken the same charge against Obama by so-called “birthers” and turned it against Cruz. Both Cruz and Obama share one thing in common — both were born to mothers who were American citizens. The Supreme Court has not definitively ruled on presidential eligibility requirements.  But a congressional study concludes that the constitutional requirement that a president be “a natural born citizen” includes those born abroad of one citizen parent who has met U.S. residency requirements.

“I can tell you where I was born and who my parents were. And then as a legal matter, others can worry about that. I’m not going to engage,” Cruz said in the interview with “This Week” on ABC. Cruz was in Iowa last week, speaking to a group of conservative pastors and a state GOP fundraiser. He’s already been to the early-primary state of South Carolina and is scheduled to headline a fundraiser in New Hampshire next month, fueling speculation that he may be weighing a presidential bid. The freshman Texas senator, who took office in January, said it’s premature to talk about a 2016 presidential race.

In the Senate, Cruz has established himself as a leading opponent of immigration reform that includes a “pathway to citizenship” for millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States. A potential political rival, Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, has championed that idea as part of a comprehensive approach to dealing with illegal immigration. Cruz said Rubio “proceeded in good faith” but was wrong. “I think a patch to citizenship for those who are here illegally is profoundly unfair to millions of legal immigrants who followed the rules,” he said.

At one point during the interview, Cruz noted a satirical critique by comedian Jon Stewart, who called him a “dirty syrup guzzler” – a reference to the senator’s birth in Canada. “I will tell you, in response to that, I did send Jon Stewart a letter saying that I rarely guzzled syrup,” he said. “But any time that I did, it was Texas syrup. And I sent him a bottle of Texas syrup and invited him to a syrup festival in the state of Texas.”