The Tea Party Convention in Nashville is generally being reported as a wonderful outpouring of populist fervor. Wonderful if you like populist fervor, which some, like Andrew Breitbart--do not.

WorldNetDaily Editor-in-Chief Joseph Farah used his Friday night dinner speech at the Tea Party convention to “raise questions” about the President Obama’s citizenship, much to the disgust of other attendees, including Andrew Breitbart. “It’s self-indulgent, it’s narcissistic, it’s a losing issue,” Breitbart told one of Farah’s minions, his frustration evident.

Breitbart is overreacting, which he seems to have a tendency to do. The so-called Birther conspiracy is rather benign within the Tea Party movement, serving more like icing on the cake of generalized dissatisfaction that a serious strategic proposition.

Farah on on the other hand, can't seem to grasp the fact that whether Obama is or is not a citizen of this country by the technical letter of the law as it was written in the early 1960s, is completely irrelevant at this point.

Let assume that the birthers are right, and Obama is in fact a Nigerian citizen with no legal standing in the U.S. Think of that fact as bullets that you can shoot from your pistol at a car speeding past you. As the car approaches you from the distance, its too far away for an effective shot, but as it gets within 50 yards (workable pistol range), the car's angle is changing very quickly. You have a fraction of a second to take proper aim and fire your weapon at the driver. If you miss or hesitate, the car is already speeding past you and every fraction of a second that passes reduces the probability that you can hit the driver.

There might have been a time and place where the fact could have 'killed' the Obama campaign, perhaps at the moment he filed papers to run for President, or shortly before, but as the campaign rolled on and he began to rack up delegates, the car was well down the road.

Obama is President of the U.S.A. What are you going to do? Convince a majority Democrat Congress to remove him from office? Even if Republicans won majorities in both houses of Congress this fall, such a move on a popularly elected Chief Executive would set an extremely dangerous precedent and seriously destabilize the country. The balance of power would swing wildly into Congress's direction because they would now have the power to change any President they didn't like for the most trivial of reasons. Do you truly dislike Obama more than you like the constitutional principle of balance of powers?

Think of this as an argument with your wife (or husband). You may be right, but what will you 'win' by insisting on the acknowledgment of your 'rightness'?

That's right...there are larger issues at stake, and sometimes that means you defer an argument to a more auspicious time.

MARK ADDS: I hope Mick will put up with me contradicting him in the body of his own post.

1. The real issue is not whether Obama was born a US citizen, but whether he can or will show that he was born in the USA as apparently specified in the Constitution and amendments. This is not trivial. It disqualifies Schwarzenegger who once looked highly 'papabile', it might have disqualified McCain, it would disqualify some future Churchill who's mother was American and it disqualifies 2 of my children, I guess. What The Framers framed is by definition consequential.

2. I have no doubt that Obama is a US citizen, but if he weren't, then he'd be Kenyan or British rather than Nigerian.

3. The importance of the issue does not swing only on the proximate political fallout, which I read as your main argument. The importance is historical. When a more dispassionate future reviews the passionate now the question will be "How the hell did this fraud become president?" America has pretty much rumbled after only a year that Obama is at best a fraud in terms of competence but, much worse, a functional Manchurian Candidate in terms of policy. An historical understanding of the Obama Derangement Syndrome that got him to President needs the truth about his literal qualification to really suss how the con was done - else the con will morph and recur in trickier shape still.

4. 'Birtherism' is ready made for kooks so rational conservatives like you or Hawkins would shy away from it, but I am not a kook (I'm not a kook, I'm not a kook I tell you) but even if I am, you might re-read Andrew Non-kook McCarthy's piece referenced in my post 'I, Birther.'

MICK REPLIES: I rather enjoy being contradicted--thus are discussion born.

1. You might want to look at how the definition of "natural born" has changed over the years. All my children were born abroad, and their births registered (as John McCain's was...), and thus in spite of their 'foreign' births, they are considered to be natural born rather than naturalized. The statutory law surrounding the specific terms under which a foreign birth is considered to be a natural born, has changed over the years, which is why I referred to the law at the time of Obama's birth. One of the main birther arguments is that he didn't meet the strict requirements of the law (although there is no proof this was the case...) As I pointed out--that 'bullet' would have been deadly at the time Obama was filing papers, where his legal ineligibility would have been problematic. At this point though, having been elected, the election ratified, the President sworn in, etc... birthers would destroy the constitutional house to get at the statutory termite.

That in the end was my main point--the constitutional issues to accommodate the birther desire that Obama be removed from office, would in effect destroy the separation of powers. It would set a precedent where Congress could remove just about any President they didn't like on the slightest excuse (an a technical violation of birth abroad registration is the 'slightest excuse)

2. Well I have to ask--is Obama a fraud because he may not be natural born, or is he a fraud because he misrepresented himself during the campaign? If we are going to sticklers for the historical record, then we have to be sure that our own motivations are clear and above board. The Democrats are paying the price for the so-called 'fraud'--that much is already clear. In any event, the historical lessons of Obama derangement syndrome won't prove useful, because the generation that has learned the lesson will be replaced with fresh, easily deluded meat. The sensible action is to check each candidate's qualifications with a fine-toothed comb--that means a new media dynamic--with funding.

3. The left's name-calling has utterly no effect on me, and I'm not saying you have to be a kook to wonder about Obama's minimum qualifications to be President--I in fact have and will continue to wonder, and for the reasons outlined in the birther post you linked to--Obama's own response has been extremely suspect. Yet there is nothing that can be done at this point to shed more light on the subject, and nothing to be done that help anymore than Obama's profound incompetence isn't already doing.

What I am most concerned about is the environment in which a far-left radical narcissist with no experience in running anything, could actually be elected to become the President of the United States. Whether he is or is not natural born is inconsequential compared to the other more salient facts that the media actively ignored as part of the conspiracy to deceive the American voter.

How do we fix THAT!

I'd say we've made a good beginning in establishing an alternate news media and now a truly grassroots political movement. Citizens have to get off their duffs and run their country. There is an enormous amount of work to do still.

That's moving forward. Birtherism is navel-contemplation.

Dave's 2 cents: I have no more reason to doubt President Obama's citizenship then George Bush's. The birthers haven't produced any evidence and barring a question at the time of filing the campaign documents, if I was Obama now, I'd tell the birthers to stuff it about producing a birth certificate. As Mick points out, the time for questioning has long gone - or are we going to dig up the birth certificates of every past president to see if they really were born in the US too? And if we can't find one for them, what then?

Constitutionally, this birther controversy is akin the move to disqualify Dick Cheny as George Bush's VP since the constitution disallows the president and vice president to come from the same state (Dick Cheny was living in Texas at the time of his nod - and presumably a Texas resident). This was easily overcome because the rules for determining state residency are pretty much non-existent.

I don't see removal of Obama from the presidency the goal of most birthers. Rather it gives them a reason question his and the government's legitimatcy. This is similar to the left howling George Bush was illegally installed as President by the Supreme Court in 2004. Such grievances may come in handy for disaffected groups if they decide to pen a new Declaration of Independence, but that's about it. It requires more than lawyers to make a declaration of independence stick.