Apparently, the real policy on gays in the military is don’t ask, don’t tell, and hope to God some other jerk doesn’t tell, either.

Bill O’Reilly thinks it’s a “pretty extreme position” that the Bill of Rights remains in force when it snows in wintertime:

The next night he non-explained his position by noting that President Lincoln (and many others, but who’s counting) suspended habeas corpus. Never mind that habeas has nothing to do with the Bill of Rights, or that the part of the Constitution that does protect habeas, which is Article I, Section 9, clause 2 of the original Constitution, expressly provides that habeas may be suspended “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” while no comparable limiting language appears anywhere in the Bill of Rights. The mainstream view of the Constitution is whatever Bill O’Reilly tells you it is. Actually reading the damned thing is an extremist position.

If there is one thing more American than apple pie, it’s the Constitution, but if there’s one thing even more American than that, it’s the Declaration of Independence. If we were all still British subjects, we could have drawn up the best Constitution in the world and it wouldn’t have done anyone a lick of good; it would be the Constitution of Nowhere. So harping on the idea of someone mixing up one with the other is, in my view, only marginally less lame than harping on someone confusing one article of the Constitution with another. The only thing even lamer than that is to harp on someone supposedly confusing the two when they actually didn’t. Leave it to Greg Hengler and Jim Hoft, Modern Conservative, Ed Lasky and Lord knows how many others, who proudly pounced on this alleged yawner during the STFU speech, in which The One said:

Abroad, America’s greatest source of strength has always been our ideas. The same is true at home. We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the notion that we’re all created equal, but no matter who you are and what you look like, if you abide by the law, you should be protected by the law. If you adhere to our common values, you should be treated no different from anyone else. We must continually renew this promise.

Which Hoft and the rest helpfully dowdified down to:

We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution: the notion that we are all created equal….

to imply that Obama had only talked about the premise that we were created equal and notabout the fact that we enjoy the equal proteciton of laws as a result. They proceeded to gloat about the non-fact that The One had supposedly confused the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence. In fact, as the word “notion” should have made clear to anyone listening for comprehension rather than for gotcha, he wasn’t quoting anything. The “notion” in question underlies both documents, but only the Constitution – not the Declaration of Independence – provides for equal protection of laws as a result. If The One had said exactly what he said, only citing “the promise enshrined in our Declaration of Independence” instead, Hoft et al. could just as easily have pounced on the reference to equal protection and accused Obama of having made the same screw-up in reverse. Only this one, unlike the technical foul alleged by Hoft and the gang, would actually have been substantively stupid. While it’s moderately neato that the Declaration of Independence talked of the principle that all men are created equal, it didn’t do a f’ing thing to guarantee anyone equality before the law. Anyone who doubts this should travel back in time to any point between 1776 and 1865, when the Declaration of Independence was in effect but the 14th Amendment was not, and ask the slaves how their “equal protection of laws” thing was working out.

I used to complain about the fact that one innocent person is dead because Mike Huckabee was once governor of Arkansas. I regret to say that I was off by a factor of five (so far?).

UPDATE: More at Hot Air.

It’s official: Barack Obama was born in Kenya and so was I.

Andrew McCarthy offers an interesting pseudo-defense of the birthers. He starts by noting, as NRO’s editorial staff rightly did before, that Barack Hussein Obama was almost certainly born in Honolulu, HI on August 4, 1961, and that producing a long-form birth certificate is extremely unlikely to show otherwise. He then proceeds to go a bit off the rails first by echoing birther hair-splitting over “certificates” vs. “certifications” (hint: both have the same root word certify, and for the same reason), and then by conflating the concept of a “vault copy” (the original, long-form birth certificate, which likely no longer exists) with the state records derived from it and used to generate, among other things, the COLB.

Returning to earth, McCarthy lists a number of aspects of Obama’s life on which President Transparency has been … well … less than transparent. He largely ignores the fact, however, that scarcely any of them would be clarified by producing the original long-form birth certificate, if it still exists, or all of the records surrounding his birth which are in the State of Hawaii’s possession, if it does not. Yeah, it sucks that Obama got away with claiming his first job out of college was as a junior copy-editor with a small company that employed several blacks rather than as a financial writer for a multinational corporation that hired no blacks other than him. And it’s lame that he got away with telling some people he met his wife at school rather than work, and lamer still to lead some to believe he’d grown up on food stamps rather than being raised in comfort by his well-to-do grandparents. But who in his right mind thinks the “vault copy” of his birth certificate from 1961 would tell us anything about what Obama would or would not do later in life? The closest McCarthy comes to identifying a key issue on which the vault copy might bear is Obama’s possible past Indonesian citizenship and the even more important question of whether his surname was ever Soetoro. Even if we do care about these petty issues (dual citizenship may not be petty, but hair-splitting over dual vs. three-way citizenship is), one really has to wonder what would possess the normally sensible McCarthy to quote Larry Johnson, of all people, in support of the theory that the vault copy would resolve these issues, anyway.

McCarthy’s Balkoesque defense of the birthers is perhaps best summed up by this paragraph:

While it is all well and good to belittle the birth-certificate controversy, without it we’d know only what the media and Obama himself would tell us about his multiple citizenships, which is nothing.

Right, ‘cuz before a band of kooks ran amuck claiming Obama wasn’t a citizen, no one challenged him on his lack of transparency or his self-serving and often inconsistent accounts of his past. Even if it were true that birther insanity was the catalyst for some new level of scrutiny that appears to have come only in McCarthy’s imagination, do we really want to hang our collective hat on the theory that it’s OK to run around making allegations McCarthy himself acknowledges as crazy, just because all this crazy talk on Topic A might lead someone say something non-crazy about Topic B? Really?

Me, I’m a lot more concerned about an environment where no one can challenge Obama on any of the many legitimate bases there are for criticizing him, without being branded as a birther kook. We saw this before in the 1990s, where anyone who attacked Clinton for anything other than being too moderate got lumped together with the nuts who were convinced he’d murdered Vince Foster with his bare hands. I did not like that enviornment then. I do not care to see it replicated now. Rather than trying to rehabiliate these nuts, our message to them should be a clear and unambiguous “thanks for nothing.” Even that is on the generous side, as they have actually contributed something of value to the debate. The problem is that that value is negative.

Looks like I may owe the birthers an apology. While World Nut Daily spams about the DVD Obama doesn’t want would love you to see or better yet, be dumb enough to believe, Robb Allen has the memo, obtained from unimpeachable sources, that B. Hussein O. was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the other memo showing that Article II, Section 1 really says:

No Person except a natural born Citizen who wasn’t born in Kenya . . . shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

Meanwhile, Mary K agrees with Andrew Sullivan’s critique of birtherbattery.

Isn’t anyone who doesn’t buy into birther nonsense a liberal? I mean, if I am, surely the Coultergeist is, too, right?

Stefan Frederick KCook’s goofy lawsuit has taken a turn for the even more bizarre. While Drudge focuses on the fact that two more washed up ex-military types have thrown away their reputations to push this hopeless cause, I focus instead on the fact that Cook himself, as represented by his crank “esquire,” is pushing forward with his case even though he already got the very relief he had prayed for:

The government, in its response to the suit, claims that Cook’s suit is “moot” in that he already has been told he doesn’t have to go to Afghanistan, so the relief he is seeking has been granted.

“The Commanding General of SOCCENT (U.S. Special Operations Central Command) has determined that he does not want the services of Major Cook, and has revoked his deployment orders,” the response states.

In a pleading revised after the revocation of Cook’s orders, Taitz argues that the application for preliminary injunction is not moot and that retired Maj. Gen. Carol Dean Childers and active U.S. Air Force reservist Lt. Col. David Earl Graeff have joined the suit “because it is a matter of unparalleled public interest and importance and because it is clearly a matter arising from issues of a recurring nature that will escape review unless the Court exercises its discretionary jurisdiction.”

Translation: Your Honor, you can’t let the government give my client exactly what he wants (or at least, what he and I dishonestly claimed he wanted) now, or the government might turn around and give other people what they want, too! And then they’ll keep on giving everybody what they want and before you know it, nobody’s rights will have been violated. And we couldn’t have that, could we?

UPDATE: Et tu, Rushe.

Idiot reservist Stefan Frederick Cook, egged on by an idiot lawyer whose license should have been revoked a long time ago, takes birther insanity to a whole new level by arguing that he doesn’t have to deploy to Afghanistan because Barack Obama wasn’t really born in Hawaii, and Ann Dunham wasn’t a citizen either because Kansas is a rock group, not a state. Or maybe it’s because 8 U.S.C. § 1401(g) doesn’t really say this:

The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth:
[...]
a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years … This proviso shall be applicable to persons born on or after December 24, 1952, to the same extent as if it had become effective in its present form on that date.
[Emphasis added.]

but rather, this:

The following shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth:
[...]
a person born outside the geographical limits of the United States and its outlying possessions of parents one of whom is an alien, and the other a citizen of the United States who, prior to the birth of such person, was physically present in the United States or its outlying possessions for a period or periods totaling not less than five years, at least two of which were after attaining the age of fourteen years … This proviso shall be applicable to persons born on or after December 24, 1952, unless the guy is a real dumbass who runs for President, in which case such person shall be inaugurated anyway but everyone in the military will be free to ignore any orders they wish.
[Emphasis and content added.]

This would-be deserter should go to the brig, as should the idiot lawyer who put him up to it.

UPDATE: Tom Maguire has more.

UPDATE: Cook’s orders have been revoked. Not for the kooky reasons advanced by Cook and his idiot attorney, of course, but either way the matter now appears to be moot.