It's nice to know that the birthers won't go away merely because Barack Hussein Obama is finally going to end his illegal eight-year occupation of the White House in January 2017. Now that they've studied up a whole lot on what they think is the incontrovertible law of the United States of America, they've decided that four of the guys riding the 2016 GOP clown car may also be ineligible to be president because they're not really Natural Born Citizens.

How far out there are these fundamentalist birthers? Get this: Not even WND regular Jack Cashill (who still has SRS DOUBTS about the location of Barack Obama's birth) thinks they don't have much of an argument, as he explained in a recent column. As it turns out, at least some of the most hardcore birthers insist that it's not just Ted "Poutine" Cruz who's got a Natural Born problem. They suspect that, based on well-established legal theories pulled directly from their asses, we need to get rid of suspected Unnatural Americans Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, and Rick Santorum, too.

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Catherine Thompson at Talking Points Memo interviewed Jack Cashill -- she lost an office bet, we'll assume -- to get a better understanding of where the birther movement is today, seeing as how it stubbornly refuses to go away no matter how many times we flush. Among other amazing insights, we learn that while many birthers disagree with Cashill's conclusion that all four of the supposedly disputed candidates actually can be president, they aren't at all unhinged or rude about it. Or as Cashill explains:

[I]n very strict constitutional tea party circles it’s a very lively topic. And as I expected from my article yesterday, there were many people who attacked me for being unduly lenient in my description of who’s eligible and who’s not. It is an undercurrent. It’s not enough to turn an election, but it’s enough to cost like 1 percent of a potential electorate. That’s not to say they’d vote for the Democrat, these people typically are very conservative, but that they would just sit home and pout basically.

They are such strict constitutionalists that they don't trust the mere text of the Constitution; they need to actually probe the minds of the Founders, as Jack Cashill has, to understand that a Natural Born Citizen isn't merely someone born on U.S. soil: They also have to be born to two natural-born American citizens, which is where the conflict over Jindal, Rubio, and yes, Santorum also comes from. We would note that Cashill knows how to read a document for subtle nuances of meaning -- as we learned when he found deeply anti-Semitic undertones in a poem that 19-year-old Barack Obama wrote in college.

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So, as for Jindal, Rubio, and Santorum: sure, all three guys were born here. But according to a principle discovered by birthers -- and one that has never once survived a court case -- it's not just about citizenship. It's about LOYALTY, says Cashill:

The understanding is that you be born of American parents with unquestioned loyalty to the United States. So for instance, had Obama been born [somewhere] other than Hawaii he would not have been eligible to run for President ... If his mother had been a non-American citizen and his father had been a Kenyan, and neither had any allegiance to the United States, which in fact neither of them really did, he would not have been eligible no matter where he was born.

And that's where the problem with Jindal comes from. Both of his parents were on student visas to the USA when little Piyush was born, but how do we know they were LOYAL to America, and not India, huh? Happily, Cashill has an airtight case to prove that Bobby Jindal won't just up and move the Capital to Mumbai or something:

But given the fact that he changed his name after a character in “The Brady Bunch" -- as American as it gets -- I don’t think there’s any question in any of those candidates that there’s any dual allegiance. That’s what the law was designed to prevent, was people with dual allegiance. Especially in the early Republic when you had people who were from England or from France and who really reported back to the motherland first.

Now, there are some birthers who don't find that convincing enough, because the strictest constitutionalists -- that is, the ones with the looniest interpretation of stuff that isn't anywhere close to actually being in the Constitution -- say screw loyalty, his parents weren't citizens when they birthed that baby here in America, so forget the text of the 14th Amendment, Bobby can't be president. Same goes for Marco Rubio, and even Rick Santorum, whose father was born in fascist Italy. Still, Cashill is quite solicitous to his fellow Constitutional Scholars:

As I judge the crop of candidates who are suspect, that is Jindal, Cruz, Rubio and Santorum, they all pass that test. Others who have more finely tuned constitutional noses than I do may smell a rat. I just don’t smell it.

Same thing with Obama. If Obama were born in the United States, I don’t think you could legitimately challenge his status as a natural born citizen.

Unstated there, of course, is the lingering doubt that Obama was born in Kenya to parents who cleverly placed birth notices in a Honolulu newspaper, because they were just that sneaky.

Also, too, Cashill is pretty proud of these hardcore birthers, because, as he points out, their presence proves that the birther controversy over Barack HUSSEIN Obama was never about ideology or race: it was about Constitutional Principles, because if rightwing loonies are willing to claim that other rightwing loonies are ineligible, then none of the birther nonsense about Obama was racist. As further proof, Cashill would like you to know that not a single birther has questioned Ben Carson's eligibility, because they know exactly where he was born, and to whom, so all you liberals just shut up, OK? And while you're at it, go read Vattel’s 1758 Law Of Nations before you even think you know what the Constitution really means.

[WND / TPM]