World Net Daily is citing an outdated post-Revolutionary War act repealed by Congress that only recognized “free white persons” as citizens to make its case that Miami born Marco Rubio is not a “natural born citizen.”

WND’s argument comes in the wake of several 2011 articles, which make a birther argument that recently elected U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is not natural born because his parents were alien residents at the time he was born in Miami in 1971.

WND’s editor Joseph Farah pushed that theory on FOX News with Sean Hannity last week,  an interview that was quickly picked up by The Hill and the Daily Caller. The birther movement’s attention turned to Rubio last year when rumors began surfacing that he was a potential candidate for the vice-presidential position on the 2012 Republican ticket, despite his assertion that he was not interested in the position. Since the 12^th Amendment requires that the vice-president possess all the necessary constitutional requirements to serve as president, Rubio’s citizenship came into play.

Throughout their reporting, WND has relied on three major arguments: the first being the treatise “The Law of Nations” by Swiss philosopher Emer de Vattel, which they argue was an influence on our forefathers. Vattel wrote, “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” They also cite a U.S. Supreme Court case from 1875, Minor vs. Happersett, alleging that the case only uses the term “natural born citizen” by referring to persons born in the United States of U.S. citizen parents. Finally, they rely on the Naturalization Act of 1790, which defined a natural-born citizen as: “The children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States shall be considered as natural born citizens: Provided, that the right of citizenship shall not descend to persons whose fathers have never been resident in the United States.”

There are significant problems which each one of these three flawed arguments.

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Having settled the controversy over President Obama’s birth certificate, let us now turn to an even more important issue: his birth horoscope. Knowing the exact date, time and latitude of his birth allows us to chart the positions of the stars and planets at that exact moment, the better to understand his destiny according to the ancient methods (which were sophisticated nonsense long before today’s pop astrology was crude nonsense).

Birth Horoscope for President Barack H. Obama, constructed at alabe.com

One of the pleasures of my undergraduate education was a freshman seminar on the history of astrology. Like other occult sciences, such as alchemy, astrology developed tools and knowledge that were the foundation of today’s empirical sciences, even if its ideas were ultimately discredited. In politics, astrologers were the pundits of their time–though their methods were quite different from what we find on horoscope pages today.

According to today’s pop astrology, for example, President Obama is a Leo because he was born on August 4. The ancients, however, would have considered him an Aquarius, because the point on the horizon at the moment of Obama’s birth–the ascendant–is in the 18th degree of Aquarius (each sign being divided into 30 degrees). Our first sixties-born president really was a child of the Age of Aquarius–astrologically, anyway.

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Can you believe it?  President Obama released the long form birth certificate this morning, and it isn’t over. There still people who don’t believe the released birth certificate is real.  Apparently if you have Adobe Acrobat and look at the PDF of the long form certificate and right click, with your left foot off the ground, while chewing on a Ritz Cracker and whistling the theme song from the old Barney Miller TV show, the birth certificate will reveal that the real Paul McCartney was killed in a car accent in 1968 and for the past 43 years we have been rocking to Wayne Newton’s unknown brother Fig.

Of course, Donald Trump took all the credit, “I am really honored and I am really proud, that I was able to do something that nobody else could do,” Of course he forgot to mention the fact that two days before he told Anderson Cooper that a believable source who he could not name told him that the birth certificate was missing. I guess it got “un-missing” Mr. Trump.

And like the person who wins the lottery but complains that his take was only a few hundred million Trump isn’t done. In his next breath, Trump declared that Obama needs to release his Occidental College school records, to dispel rumors that he was a bad student who did not deserve a transfer to Columbia University,or his acceptance to  Harvard Law School.

“How do you get into Harvard if you are not a good student?” Trump said. “I don’t know why he doesn’t release his records.”

Oh Puleeze.  Who Gives a flying Frisbee!

This nonsense is a losing issue that will do nothing but alienate the moderate voters who are needed to beat Obama in the 2012 election.  That is the objective–Nobama!

But I want everyone to know that I can compromise, I am willing to join the side of the tin-foil hat crowd, but only after we are done bashing the president on the following real issues (in no particular order) which have a much more urgent priority:

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President Obama’s birth certificate is both the Hot Button and the Third Rail of politics, and rightfully so. Put aside for the moment your opinion on the specific issue, and look to the broader one: Barack Obama has not only not made available, but has actually legally sealed (at great expense) the document that could resolve this issue, plus all of his academic records, his medical records, and his travel records. People can be forgiven for suspecting that this much smoke is generated by some kind of fire.

There is a great deal of verified, factual information on the man I am calling The Enigma — information published in major newspapers like the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Presidents own writings, and so on — that does not depend on speculation or theory. The birth certificate issue goes to the President’s legitimacy. I decided to string all of this reliably reported information — none of which is in doubt and all of which is sourced on-screen — to attack not his legitimacy, but his character — which is to say, his fitness.

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