Obama's refusal to show "real" birth cert may yet end up in court

As some of you may have heard, Obama has steadfastly refused to release a "long-form birth certificate," which was and is created for every single person born in Hawaii.

A long-form certificate includes dozens of piece of authenticating information such as the hospital where the birth occurred, name of doctor, name of nurse, parents' names and similar. Similar detailed information is included on most state birth certificates.

"Wait," you're thinking. "I heard that Chris Matthews said that Obama had released his birth certificate! I can't imagine the MSM lying to us all, so this post I'm reading must be hateful propaganda!"

You've been suckered: Obama has never "released" anything. What happened was that his campaign called in a handful of Democratic bloggers and showed them a document that was purported to be a "Certificate of Live Birth." The bloggers took pictures of this paper, and digital images of this document were posted on the internet.

Those images are the only things that have been "released."

"But wait," you're thinking. "That means we have pictures of his birth certificate. Case closed."

Not at all. Hawaii is unique in that it has two different documents relating to births: One is named "Certification of Live Birth." That's the long-form BC noted above. The other is a "Certificate of Live Birth"--what the Obama campaign supposedly showed the Democratic supporters.

Easy to see how the two would be confused, eh? "Certificate" vs. "Certification."

Problem is, the latter doesn't contain any of the authenticating details that are listed on the long-form BC. Instead it merely says Joe Smith was born on [date] in [town].

Not only has Obama refused to release his long-form BC, he's spent several million dollars in legal fees to defeat moves to have that document released. Since money is so vital to winning elections, that's...curious to say the least.

Finally, the short-form document that was photographed by Democrat supporters and posted on the internet has never been examined by neutral experts. Seems most doubts could easily be put to rest if Obama offered to let the GOP bring in a couple of forensic experts and go over the alleged BC with a microscope.

But of course this hasn't been done, and likely won't be. And there has to be some reason.

All this is background for the current story: A senior Army officer--a Lieutenant Colonel and M.D.-- has refused an order to deploy for a year to Afghanistan, on the grounds that IF the president is not constitutionally eligible to hold that office, any orders he causes to be issued by the military chain of command he heads are unlawful.

This case is important because the handful of courts that have even allowed citizens to file suits to force Obama to prove his eligibility have quickly ruled that the filers don't have "standing" to sue.

In other words, even though the people filing suit were citizens and presumably had a huge legal interest in whether the president was legally qualified to hold that office, the courts said that bona fide American citizens weren't legally qualified to sue to force a thorough airing of that question.

Wow...as a citizen, you have no right to sue to have an explicit provision in the Constitution enforced! Bizarre.

But the case of LTC Lakin is different, because the president--as Commander in Chief of the armed forces--has the authority to order soldiers into combat. This is obviously a life-or-death matter, so it's hard to imagine any American who would be better said to have standing to file suit.

The other thing that's interesting here is that LTC Lakin is (understandably) being court-martialed for refusing to obey a direct and lawful order. So the matter of Obama's birthplace is being raised not as a de-novo issue but as a defense to the charges against the officer. Thus the court can't reasonably just ignore the question without taking away the guy's entire defense.

An added twist: Military courts are independent of all other courts except the Supreme Court, and military judges--unlike most civilian judges--are generally pretty no-nonsense guys. So it should be at least somewhat harder to get the military judge to simply drop the court-martial (although this has happened in other cases, so it's not out of the question).

Now, I don't have any reason to suspect that Obie wasn't born in Hawaii, as he claims. But it's clear that he's been fighting like mad to avoid releasing his long-form BC--the one with all the details.

There's a reason for that, and I'd like to know what it is.