A Birth Certificate Beats A Death Certificate Any Day

by Neville Raymond


In our American democracy, those who hold the keys to the White House can be said to fall into two groups.
There are the millions of citizens who dutifully show up at the polling booth. And when they cast their vote, it is invariably for someone who stumps around the country, telling everybody what they want to hear, and then doing just the opposite.
Then there is the handful of oligarchs who handpick the guy that the voters will rubberstamp as their next president. And it is invariably someone who shows up at the doorstep of their mansion or penthouse suite, hat in hand, promising to do whatever they want him to do - even if it is the exact opposite of what the people want.

Oh sure, you’re feeling bad right about now that you’re in the wrong group. As Mel Brooks says, it’s good to be the king - maker, that is. But don’t be too envious. The process is hardly as risk-free as it appears.
I mean, look at John F. Kennedy. The kingmakers put him into the Oval Office. He owes his political fortune to them. And yet he turns around and does something incredibly rash and stupid. Like issuing a directive to pull troops out of Vietnam. Or overriding the Federal Reserve to have the government print its own money interest-free. Or threatening to smash the CIA to smithereens. Sheesh! Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! What could the poor oligarchs do but salve their outraged sense of betrayal with an assassin’s bullet?

If you think about it, it has got to be their worst nightmare. They may know how to pick ‘em. But not necessarily how to make ‘em stick with the program. The problem with crowning a young, charismatic, eloquent upstart as the leader of the free world is his undeniable power to inspire the people. What if he starts believing in his own rhetoric? What if he is carried away by the momentum that he has whipped up in his millions of supporters? What if, God forbid, he lives up to the expectations of all the people who voted for him - and in doing so, stabs the oligarchs in the back?
Now that would be bad news - the kind that no network would ever want to broadcast, no matter how staunchly it adheres to the motto, if it bleeds, it leads! Surely there has to be way of cracking down on these presidential loose cannons before they do any real damage. Assassination is all very well and good - if you can pull it off. But just look at how messy the last one turned out. It’s almost fifty years later and they are still talking about it - and hardly anyone believes the government’s side of it any more!

Of course, you can always put a brain-dead dummy - or a heart-dead doormat - in the Oval Office. Someone like George W. Like little Mikey in the old TV cereal commercials, he’ll eat anything you put in front of him. He has a cast-iron stomach for any line of crap that would makes a normal person want to gag. But then look at where it gets you. You cheapen the high office of the presidency. And you wind up with the most despised President in the history of the United States.

There has got to be a better way. You would think that with all those think tanks at their disposal, the oligarchs would come up with a smarter solution. And perhaps they may have, at that. Go with a charismatic leader, if you have to. Get the people all fired up and ready to storm the Bastille. And then, to make sure that your man knows when to bring everybody back to earth with a thud, have an insurance policy up your sleeve. Something to hold over the President’s head if all that public acclaim and popular enthusiasm goes to his head. Something right there in the Constitution, in black and white, that would immediately get him fired from the job. Like what, you wonder? Well, how about that he is not born on American soil? That would do it. Then, if he should refuse to play ball - if he should dare to go so far as to actually reform the healthcare system or abolish the Fed or end the war in Afghanistan and Iraq or do any of those things that would uphold the Constitution and serve the interests of the American people - you have a slam-dunk mechanism for making sure he’s history. It doesn’t have to be anything as messy as a coroner, all bought and paid for, ready to sign off on his death certificate. It could just be some Kenyan official waiting for the signal to step forward with his original birth certificate.