Our editorial “Does This Insolent, Oddly-Named Negress Think She Can Fool Decent Americans?” Has Nothing To Do With Racist Birth-er-ism

An appeal to common sense from Newsweek

© 2017 Mobilus in Mobili under a Creative Commons license

We have published this editorial note because, to our surprise, many people have reacted strongly, even with hostility, to the op-ed we published the other day by Dr. I.M.A. Wingnut Factotum, “Does This Insolent, Oddly-Named Negress Think She Can Fool Decent Americans?”

Dr. Factotum’s essay has been vilified as so-called alleged “birth-er-ism,” which legend has it was used by persons unknown — certainly not by anyone connected with Dr. Factotum or the Republican Party — against former president Hussein Obama to falsely suggest that he was not born in Hawaii in an attempt to suggest his ineligibility for the presidency, and we deplore any such calumnious argument against his citizenship that does not refer to the Kenyan citizenship of his father which is a known and too-little-investigated fact.

Dr. Factotum’s essay was obviously a high-minded, 10,000-foot overview of the Constitutional issues raised when an aged Democratic presidential nominee presumptive named, perhaps in a moment of dementia, a so-called alleged “black” (but not “African” “-” “American” (according to a DNA sample we got from a coffee cup which we’ll be writing about next week!) Jamaican-Indian-who-knows-what “person” “of” alleged-so-called “color” (check our Pantone analysis in an upcoming issue!) to be a heartbeat away from the AMERICAN Presidency, and only a political-motivated churl would believe otherwise. Take for example this excerpt:

The controversial 14th Amendment clause claiming “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside” is read by uneducated people to mean “all persons who are born or naturalized in the United States” would naturally be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” thus making such persons — again, in this fanciful view — “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” My studies show, however, that this anachronistic modern “birth on the soil no matter the circumstances” view would never have occurred to the Founders, nor even to the carpetbaggers and scalawags who pushed through this “Reconstruction” Amendment. Can you imagine a sensible citizen of, say, Mississippi in 1868 looking at Kamala Harris and believing her to be eligible for the Presidency? It is prima facie absurd, ipso facto. Would such a person think the same of those Mestizo seasonal workers whom we called, in a simpler and more American time, wetbacks? To follow are several Latin phrases that emphasize my point.

Dr. Factotum has standing to make such claims: He is a professor of law at Fiddlehead University and a senior fellow at the Lester Maddox Institute for Reverse Racism Studies, and knows Latin. When a scholar of his credentials demands that Harris, a mere Senator, submit her family records to rigorous examination by him and his fellow Maddox scholars, and maybe a few Republican Congressmen, all honest people must take him seriously. (Here we add, as demanded by a biased judge in response to a frivolous lawsuit, that Dr. Factotum once ran for an office won instead by Senator Harris, a minor factoid no serious person could consider an impediment to his judgement.)

We close by saying that whatever you think of the matter, Senator Harris’ eligibility will certainly continue to be a subject of controversy, at least as long as we have something to say about it anyway. And if you persist in criticizing Dr. Factotum and us, we’ll write a column about how you’re all doing cancel culture to us, so there.