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Theodora30's avatar

Eric you did something important in this post that most of the media doesn’t bother to do — give the facts about the constitution which prove why Harris qualifies as a citizen instead of just saying that claim is false or is a lie. When the Republicans were claiming that Obama wasn’t born in the US they were spreading two lies. The first was that Obama was born in Africa but they they were also implying that a child has to have been born on US soil to qualify as a natural born US citizen. While the media did pushback on the claim that Obama wasn’t born in the US, I never saw any of them push back on the ridiculous idea that being born to a US citizen outside the US means a that child can’t be a citizen at birth, a “naturalized citizen”. The media should have also debunked that ridiculous idea and made it clear that if just one parent is a US citizen a child is a natural born citizen even if they are born on the moon. The only caveat is that parent must have lived for at least five years in the US. I have a grandchild who was born in Europe. His mother is not a US citizen yet our State Department immediately issued him a passport, something only a US citizen can get. It only required his birth certificate and proof that his father is a US citizen who had lived in the US for at least 5 years.

The media had an opportunity to correct the misleading impression the public was getting about Americans born abroad but they couldn’t be bothered. The fact that Republicans had no problem with the foreign born Ted Cruz running for president should have also gotten a lot more attention. The media should have given the public an explicit explanation of why Cruz is a natural born citizen even though only one of his parents is a US citizen and he was born in Canada.

A similar thing happened with the media coverage of Hillary’s email practices. Republicans were clearly implying that she jeopardized classified information by using her private email account instead of the State Department’s email server. The media never bothered to explain that State.gov is not a secure server and is never used for communicating classified information. SCIFs - Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities- are used for those communications. Either reporters were having too much fun trashing Hillary or were too lazy to learn the basic facts of this issue. Chris Cillizza who obsessively wrote about the email “scandal” clearly didn’t understand this basic fact. When he was told that Colin Powell had used a separate system for communicating sensitive information, Cillizza insisted that meant Powell had used State.gov for his classified communications.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/10/17/clinton-lawyer-pounds-cnns-chris-cillizza-on-email-analysis-piece/

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Kitty's avatar

In 2016 the press couldn’t stop talking about “her email” and Benghazi. It helped catapult Trump. Painful to remember.

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