Duncan: Birther Re-born

When all other tricks are failing, maybe it’s time to pull a few old ones out of the bag, Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-SC) apparently believes, as he made evident in a recent radio interview.

Appearing on the rightwing TruNews radio show on June 14, Duncan made claims about President Obama’s citizenship, telling host Rick Wiles that “…Americans have questions… about the president’s validity.”

Wiles had just asked him “any chance the House may actually pursue Barack Obama’s phony identification papers?”  (Click here to listen to that interview.)

This perpetuation of tabloid topics is nothing new to Duncan, though, who made many other gutter-press statements this year.

In April Duncan claimed on his facebook page that use of the National Instant Background Check System, which gun shops use to quickly determine if a customer can legally purchase a weapon, was equivalent to “the Rwandan genocide(.)”

At a Congressional hearing that same month, he questioned Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano about a childish rumor that DHS was accumulating weapons for a planned attack on citizens. Duncan claimed that this gossip’s distribution among rightwing websites made it “start having some credibility.”

In May he introduced a bill to block the Census Bureau from any type of productivity except for a biennial population count, claiming its projects – even the bureau’s records of industry sales and foreign trade – were attacks on personal privacy.

Earlier in this same month of June, Duncan witnessed training of IRS criminal investigation enforcement at a DHS facility, then made public claims that ordinary IRS agents were authorized to attack citizens’ homes with assault weapons.

His most recent incident isn’t just false, but old, too.

The “birther” theory first arose in 2008, when opponent supporters made claims that President Obama was not born in the United States, thus making him ineligible for the office due to the Constitutional “natural-born citizen” requirement. (Some theorize this tactic was attempted to thwart questionability of Republican candidate John McCain’s eligibility; McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, although on a U.S. military base.)

Although Obama released his short-copy birth certificate in 2008, the claims continued throughout his campaign and first term. A certified original “long form” was released by the State of Hawaii in 2011.

Duncan was first elected representative of South Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District in 2010.