I still like you, Judge Alex, Happy Birthday Mr. President, and the Birthers

Judge Alex, my Twitter follower if not my actual friend, as I am not delusional and know the difference between celebrity social media rllationships and real-life friendshps

Where do I begin . . .except to note thst while Judge Alex's photo is set on "large' and Donald Trump's photo is set on "medium," size, even considering the head shot angle versus a "from the waist-up" orientation, note the relative differences in the sizes of the heads of the two men. Also note that money, as evidenced by the lower photo, can't necessarily buy a decent hair stylist.

This blog was to be about reality TV, but I allowed myself to become sidetracked in a major way. I'll discuss reality TV in the near future.  Then again, maybe I won't.  Regardless, for the most part, such is not the topic of the bulk of this post. I apologize if you are offended or even disappointed by my abrupt change in direction of topic, although since I never announced my topic in advance, you probably neither know nor care of the substitution.

I am once again being followed by Judge Alex on Twitter. Someone else on Twitter complained rather bluntly -- even rudely -- about having been un-followed by Judge Alex. I commiserated with the person and said the same had happened to me. I offered by way of a possible though far from definitive explanation that perhaps, with so many Tweeters who wish to be followed by him, Judge Alex can only follow any single Tweeter for a given amount of time before un-following the person to make room for someone else.  Judge Alex himself (as opposed to admin) posted to say that such was not the case. He said that his administrator periodically un-follows Tweeters who no longer follow him because of a perceived lack of interest. He said he had no idea what happened in my case, as I had never un-followed him. I am, in fact, one of his more regular communicators, though I make a sincere effort not to make too much of pest of myself. Being a minor pest is part of my job and is something I  do especially  well, if I may be so bold as to say so myself.

The bottom line is that Judge Alex again follows me. I no longer consider him a snob. I am happy, and all is right with the world, at least from this particular standpoint. Iran is still developing nuclear weapons, all manner of chaos is going on in Africa as well as various parts of the Mideast and North Korea, and there are still people walking the surface of the U. S., some of whom actually possess the power to cast votes, who believe that Barack Obama was born somewhere other than Hawaii, and is therefore not the actual President of the United States.  

Some of these people even accept that President Obama was born in Hawaii but still deny his rightful claim to the presidency on the grounds of his lack of valid U. S. citizenship by virtue of their rejection the 1959 Hawaii Admission Act and the March Referendum [a vote by residents, passed by a margin of 17 to1, to agree to statehood as opposed to continued status as a US territory; independence was not an option].This they proclaim, and do so loudly and proudly, despite the fact that, even had Hawaii been not a state but a mere territory, Barack Obama still would have been a rightful U. S. citizen.  

This is akin to my suggesting that the Compromise of 1850 never occurred or was otherwise somehow an invalid document and legal action, and that Texas remains, to this day, a sovereign nation. Such would clearly delineate that President George W. Bush, though born in Connecticut, clearly made his residence in and lived the greatest part of his life in  Texas, a residency which, in recognition of Texas sovereign status, would clearly invalidate his own U. S. citizenship and make him, therefore, ineligible to hold the office of President of the United States. Clearly, my suggestion is perfectly ludicrous. While George W. Bush was not a politician with whom I was or am politically aligned, I recognize his former standing as the holder of the office of President of the United States, and , despite any ideological differences I may have had with him, I respect the office of the Presidency of the United States and accord former President Bush #2 all rights and Privileges in accordance with the office. 

Still, once the infamous birth certificate of Barack Obama was produced  (Donald Trump's legacy, the pride for which I am certain he will carry with him to his grave, unless the man is so incredibly narcissistic that he plans on having himself cryogenically preserved, in which case he will carry the pride with him into the freezer) and even before, since the portion of the document necessary to certify the citizenship of Barack Obama was already available to the public,  the issue of the lack of Barack Obama's rightful claim to the presidency was precariously close to my perfectly ludicrous claim that President George W. Bush was a citizen not of the United States of America but of the Republic of Texas. Such is bat-shit crazy talk, yet it is far more parallel to the Birthers' claims than many acknowledge.

Furthering Mr. Trump's position in this fiasco, he treats himself as some sort of hero for his role in forcing the state of Hawaii to finally release the long form of President Obama's birth certificate. 

The undertaking was arguably out of line both as to the action of Mr. Trump and  to the response of the state of Hawaii in the sense that were I to approach my own county registrar with the request for the same long-form document  of my birth, my request would be denied. Why should Donald Trump, just because of his prominence as an obnoxious celebrity, have been given in to when neither you nor  I would  have received the same consideration had we requested such documentation concerning our own births? Still, Mr. Trump was not going away; the state of Hawaii most likely did what it had to do.

 My point here, though, is that Mr. Trump portrays himself as some sort of Moses speaking God's word from the top of the mountain (minus Moses' brother Aaron; Moses allegedly had a cleft lip or some similar major problem or defect resulting in a speech impediment so severe as to require the need for a spokesperson) for producing the long form of President Obama's birth certificate when all the production of such documentation accomplished was to verify what the President, his grandmother, and everyone who knew anything about his actual birth had been saying all along: that he was born  on August 4, 1961, IN THE STATE OF HAWAII.   What, in Mr. Trump's over-inflated self-opinion, rendered this act in any way as a furtherance of his cause?

In conclusion, I would like to paraphrase something that President Obama himself once said in [mock] praise of his mother, although he was not denigrating her,  but rather, the whole Birther movement. Stanley Ann Durham was so incredibly intelligent and filled with foresight that it occurred to her, at the age of eighteen,  while giving birth in Kenya to a baby boy, to have the birth announced in both the Honololu Advertiser AND the Honolulu Star Bulletin  and to record the birth in both newspapers as having taken place in Kapiolani Hospital in Honolulu, because she instinctively knew at that ripe old age of eighteen that her baby boy would one day run for President  of the United States of America and would need false documentation that the child had been born in the U. S. and not in Kenya, where the Birthers allege that the child was actually born. This is intended as no slight on Stanley Ann (she later dropped the Stanley and was called Ann ) Dunham's intelligence, as she attained a high level of education , earning multiple degrees, including eventually  a PhD in anthropology from the University of Hawaii, Manoa Campus in 1992, before succumbing to cancer in 1995. Rather, it serves as a  a testament to the sheer absurdity of everything for which the Birther movement and its proponents ever stood.

If you are or ever were a Birther, do yourself and the rest of us a favor: go hide under a rock, or, at the very least,  keep your ridiculous political opinions to yourself.