Former NY gov.: Obama is American—if not, ‘he got away with it’

David Paterson. Photo by Wikipedia/David Shankbone

I had thought the challenges to the authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate were over. The whole made-up controversy has been absurd, to say the least. But it seems to keep finding its way back into the news.

Today it was because of some that David Paterson, the former New York governor, said on his radio show. After defending Obama’s citizenship, an unnecessary exercise, Patterson said:

“You know, even if he wasn’t born in the United States at this point, it’s kind of like he got away with it. A lot of people get away with a lot of things.”
“You know, we learned later that Nixon spied on Johnson’s Paris peace talks. That was actually an act of…uh…I mean it was against the interests of the United State’s government. You’ve got to say that before you would say it was treason. But it was, but he got away with it. They decided it wasn’t a good thing to bring up at that particular time. Not only did he get away with it, he won the election, so maybe they should have brought it up.”

That statement, particularly the last line, seems to give more credence to the birther trope than the countervailing effect of any previous statement Paterson made saying Obama is American-born. The last time I mentioned birther news was this past winter when one of Mitt Romney’s sons cracked a birther joke.