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Thursday, July 24, 2008

Well, what do you expect from supporters of a candidate who is allied with a president who thinks the Constitution is just a piece of paper?
Posted by Jill | 8:34 PM
I don't know how Maha got through this entire post without vomiting all over the keyboard.

You know, I've been having some "Hey you damn kids, get off my lawn" moments recently myself, though at least mine have been in the context of actual kids and an actual lawn. In my case, said kids live on the crest of a hill at the bottom of which is a cross street, and I'm not sure how safe it is for them to be playing softball in the street at rush hour when people are on their way home from work. Said kids have also been known to sled down the incline in front of their house into the street during a snowstorm when a Civic or Corolla needs a good head of steam to get up the snowy hill by sheer force of will. And at least said kids are like six and eight years old.

But with Barack Obama evoking JFK in Berlin today and being met with adoring throngs, while Joe Scarborough and David Gregory try mightily to get the word out that he's just TOO successful, that for a foreign trip by a presidential candidate to go this well is, gee whiz, really ostentatious, Camp Grandpa Simpson had to come up with something.

So having so far failed at branding Obama a traitor who would deliberately lose a war to get elected, the bottom feeders at Camp Onion-on-the-belt...





... have decided that Barack Obama is simply too young to be president.

You heard me.

Forget that the Constitution states very clearly that all native-born citizens over the age of 35 are eligible for the presidency. Old Man McCain thinks us kids don't appreciate what he did for us in Vietnam. And that whippersnapper Obama had better wait his turn.

The original article cited at Mahablog is by one Steven Calabrese, a Republican hack who is on board the Chatternoodle Choo-Choo and who is also a Federalist Society member (which explains everything. Calabrese argues thusly:

Barack Obama is too young to be president. Yes I know he is 46 and the Constitution sets the presidential age qualification at 35 or higher, but Obama has said that we ought not to interpret the Constitution woodenly and formalistically. Perhaps we should look deeper at the presidential age limit. If we do, we will find that Obama really is too young to be president.

In 1789, the average life expectancy of a newborn was about 40 years, compared with about 78 today. A lot of this was because of infant mortality, but in 1789, even the average life expectancy of every man who reached age 18 was only about 47. This suggests that at best a 35-year-old age limit in 1789 might have functioned then about the way a 55- or 60-year-old age qualification would function today. On this account Obama may be old enough to drive and buy a glass of white wine, but he has a way to go before he can run for president.

Others on the legal left, such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, argue that in choosing between different interpretations of the Constitution, we should select the one that will produce the best consequences. This method too suggests that Obama should be understood to be constitutionally barred from serving as president by reason of his age. We have had three presidents out of 43 who were younger when they took office than Obama would be on Jan. 20, 2009: Bill Clinton, John F. Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt. All of them committed serious rookie blunders because they were too young.


Funny how Calabrese refuses to make George W. Bush, who was 44 when he took office and made the biggest, hugest, most grievous "rookie mistake" in the history of the presidency. He decided that anything the Clinton Administration warned him about wasn't worth bothering with. Then he ignored a Presidential Daily Briefing that said "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Then he sat in an elementary school classroom while two airplanes hit the World Trade Center and one hit the Pentagon. Then he dropped the ball in Afghanistan because Dick Cheney dangled the shiny bauble of Iraq in front of him.

You want to talk rookie mistakes? How about let's talk about George W. Bush, then.

If we weren't in a situation in which 55% of Americans find Barack Obama "risky" because he has a funny name, his "pigmentation is unseemly", and he represents something other than more lies and more war, it would be hilarious that John McCain is within striking distance of being able to either win or steal, given this kind of pulling-stuff-out-of-their-collective-posteriors that his campaign is pulling these days. But people like Calabrese are taken seriously in the media cocktail weenie circuit. I fully anticipate he will show up on Morning Joe tomorrow while unseen voices whisper love songs to McCain in Scarborough's ear, for which he will elicit entirely new lyrics from Steven Calabrese.

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1 Comments:
Anonymous Anonymous said...
Actually, I believe that George W. Bush was 54, not 44, when he was appointed to be POTUS by the Supreme Court. Which, of course, makes his "rookie" mistakes even more egregious.
7/25/08, 3:25 PM  
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