https://queenofliberty.com/2013/08/14/mark-levin-rolls-out-his-new-book/
Radio Host Mark Levin Addresses Ted Cruz Eligibility Issue posed by Ridgewood Resident at Bookends Book Signing
Partial Transcript of the Mark Levin Show aired live on Monday, August 19, 2013
(prepared using the podcast recording of the show provided free of charge at www.marklevinshow.com)
[start at 0:26 of the podcast recording]
Hello everybody, Mark Levin here, our number 877-381-3811, 877-381-3811.
Mark Levin: Before we jump in, all I can say is, Wow! You guys, open your microphones a second. Thousands of people at both booksignings. Wasn’t that unbelievable?
Staffer: There were a lot of people there, it was great.
Mark Levin: And the people were just spectacular, weren’t they? Except for one guy in New Jersey which I’ll talk about later.
Staffer: [chuckles]
Mark Levin: This… this birther stuff is way, way out of contr…”Now Ted Cruz” … I swear I almost hit this guy… “Ted Cruz is not a citizen!” No, he’s born to an American mother, no he’s born in Canada to an American mother. So all you pregnant ladies travelling overseas: According to certain birther, uh, groups, if you have a child while you are on vacation, they’re not Americans. They’re not natural-born Americans. I just thought you’d wanna know, if you were thinking of your kid as a potential presidential candidate, uh, because they say so. They have no historical background whatsoever… None! But it’s, it’s just amazing! Absolutely stunning! But we had so many wonderful people, and let me add, all races, both genders… I don’t know the sexual preferences, that wasn’t a requirement to say hello…young people, elderly, middle age people. A particularly young crowd, yeah, we had dogs come too, everybody so well behaved, and uh, it was a pleasure. In New York, we were there about four-and-a-half hours, in New Jersey about five, five-and-a-half hours, and I wanted to be respectful to everybody, so… I just want to thank you all, and this Saturday, Tyson’s Corner, Virginia, at Barnes and Noble. I should add, if you want to see the crowd that was at New York, Mr. Producer went down the line, and this was early on, this, this line kept growing and growing throughout the day…you can go look at uh MarkLevinShow.com on our website, as well as the social sites MarkLevinShow Facebook, MarkLevinShow Twitter. Um, Christians, Coptic Christians are being wiped out in Egypt. Their churches are being burned to the ground….
[stop at 3:01 of the podcast recording]
…
[restart at 59:22 of the podcast recording]
Mark Levin: Alright, lets go to uh, Steve in New York, the great WABC, go!
Steve: Great one, it’s great to talk to you, what an honor.
Mark Levin: My honor, thank you, my friend.
Steve: Oh, I got a great story for you, I loved your uh, Hannity special, I enjoyed it very much, I listened to it three times over the weekend…
Mark Levin: Oh, thank you.
Steve: …I got my wife, I got my wife to tape for me, or TIVO it, and she watched it. And she really enjoyed it. She’s not big on politics or anything, and she gets sick of hearing me talk about it, but it was funny ‘cause she said “He is so calm, Steve.” He was, she was trying to do a little wifey/husband training? And…
Mark Levin: Uh huh.
Steve: she said “He is so calm, and he gets his point across. He didn’t raise his voice, or get upset…
Mark Levin: [chuckles]
Steve: …or anything!”
Mark Levin: [breaks out into laughter]
Steve: …and I laughed so hard. I said “How do you, uh, where do you think I learned how to yell?” [laughs] “I just listen to Mark.” And she knows you’re my hero, I go around quotin’ ya, and tellin’ everybody to listen to ya, and…
Mark Levin: Well, that’s great.
Steve: she just … to get me to calm down a little, and I said you just need to listen to Mark. [laughs]
Mark Levin: Well, thank you, uh…well listen, you know what, this is called passion, just remind her it’s passion, you know, and um…what was truly exceptional about the Hannity program, number one, the man has enormous class and decency, and number two, he was asking me questions because he wanted me to inform the public about what I’d written, and to engage the studio audience. And notice we didn’t have a bunch of left-wing bomb throwers just yelling and talking over people. There were conversations actually occurring, did you notice that?
Steve: Yes, there was no crazy, I mean a lot of times he’s got the left wingers on there, and it’s just, kind, it’s almost funny to watch, but that was so interesting and…and it didn’t get me upset, and it just, I just wanted to listen to it over and over and absorb every second of it, and every bit of information, it…it’s just brilliant, Mark, I, you know I hope when um…we’ve got President Cruz, he has the wisdom to make you his chief of staff or vice-president.
Mark Levin: No, no no no no no. And he’s got a great chief of staff, by the way. No, I…I do what I do, and uh, and he will do a great job should he be president. Thank you for your call my friend. And uh, I’m so sick of these birthers. I was going to tell you about this, uh, incident. Just a wonderful group of people, uh, we were in Bookends, Ridgewood, New Jersey, and everyone was respectful until…and it was hot outside, it got hot, hotter than uh originally forecast and it was a very long line, and you know we try to go through it quickly out of respect for everybody in line, but I also try to be respectful to everybody in line. Um…but this fella [breathes out] gets in my face and first of all he points to some obscure note on page I don’t know whatever and he said [cough] excuse me folks, and he says “You were wrong about this, you were wrong about”, and honestly I, I, I didn’t have time to read it, and I’ll go back and check it, if I’m wrong about it I’ll fix it, and that happens sometimes in these books when you’re going into the notes, you might put a word when you mean another word, or a state when you mean another state, so I’m going to check it out, I just haven’t had time. And then he goes, he says uh “And Ted Cruz is not eligible to be president. He’s not a natural-born Citizen.” And I thought to myself, you know I, this is not a subject that I have studied so thoroughly, but he’s born of a mother who is an American citizen. Doesn’t that make him a natural-born Ci… “No, but he was in Canada when he was born!” Okay, but she wasn’t Canadian, she was an American citizen! She was an American citizen. And so, the issue isn’t what the Constitution says in that regard, the issue is how do we interpret that. And the way I interpret it is, his mother’s an American citizen, so he’s an American citizen! That’s not a constitutional issue, that’s an interpretive issue… or, a statutory issue if Congress has passed some law subsequent to that to enforce that provision of the Constitution. So, the face of the Constitution isn’t terribly helpful. If he was born of non-citizens in a foreign country that would be easy, and there’s a lot of easy cases. So the guy gets in my face, and he starts pointing and pointing, and I looked at him and I pointed back, and I cursed, unfortunately, but the, because, uh you know, he was…he was a nutjob. And I thought to myself: Why do you come here and do that? Is this, is this sort of the way you…you excite yourself or something? No. So, I just want you folks to know who like Ted Cruz. I…I assume they’re going to do this to Rubio, or some of these other people too, whether you like ‘em or not for president I’m just making a point, but now this has become an entire industry. And of course [chuckles] Ted Cruz [laughs], he immediately issued today or yesterday his long form birth certificate. Now, some of this is probably coming from the left. So now they’re the birthers. But some of it’s coming from others, too. People just get obsessed, or conspiratorial, and there’s no end to it, on a matter like this, and there’s nothing I can say or point to that’s going to change their mind. But in my view there’s no doubt about it that he’s eligible for president, should he choose to run, just as I believe McCain was eligible for president, when he ran. So…that’s my opinion! You may not like it… But what particularly bothered me about this guy…he was disrespectful in his conduct to everybody else standing there. They were pleasant, talking to each other, you know…listening, watching and so forth. I’m a big boy; I’ve seen this and a thousand times worse. But he was quite obnoxious. He’s the only one…oh no there was another guy, had a prob, wha wha, he what…he had a problem, he was screaming upstairs, I don’t know what he was screamin’ about. It was kind of eventful there in New Jersey. No, there wasn’t anything like that in New York, was there boys? [Staff: No. Peaceful in ji…you know in Long Island] It was peaceful on Long Island! [chuckles] But is was peaceful in New Jersey, too. It really, really was. It was just terrific. If you could have seen that line, well, actually you can. We have the uh video, and this is just the start of the day with the line. It got longer and longer at uh… at Book Review in Long Island if you want to take a look on MarkLevinShow.com or MarkLevi…oh there is now? The…the New Jersey line? Okay. Both lines. On MarkLevinShow.com, are they both on the social sites too? Or…just the Long Island. But we’ll put the other one up later so some of you can see yourselves, too. Alright. GoldLine!
[stop at 67:00 of the podcast recording]
I was there, and what Levin says is not actually what happened. I’m not sure why he said what he said on his radio program, but his description of what happened at Bookends is not right. He shouldn’t have singled out the person in question on his radio program the way he did. Something’s not right here…
“I was there, and what Levin says is not actually what happened
… his description of what happened at Bookends is not right. “
Any plans on telling us what you saw/heard or do you plan on keeping it a secret?
Mark was shown where he made a mistake in stating in a footnote that delegates from Vermont belatedly attended the constitutional convention in Philadelphia in 1787. In reality, Vermont was not even a state until 1791. Before that it was a disputed territory between New Hampshire and New York. So Vermonters were not asked to nor were they qualified to attend the Philadelphia convention. He gave his challenger no credit for reading his book carefully and bringing this non-trivial mistake to his attention. He then refused to sign the book on the page where the footnote appeared and showed distinct signs of impatience and annoyance when he opened the front of the book and began to sign it.
At this point, Mark was challenged about Cruz’s eligiblity. But the challenge did not happen as Mark said it did. The challenger asked this: “Under what possible definition of the term natural-born Citizen does your friend Ted Cruz qualify to be president?” At this same time the challenger placed an annotated copy of an earlier TheRidgewoodBlog posting repeating CNN’s recent article questioning Cruz’s eligibility, and was pointing at the document. After cursing at the challenger , Mark replied: “I never said he was a natural-born Citizen.”, upon which his challenger said: “But you must be a natural-born Citizen to be President!”. Mark then said: “No you don’t!”, and the challenger said “Yes, you do. Read the Constitution.” Levin was showing no signs of changing his tune. The challenger then turned around and left the booksigning. There was no time during any of this dialogue for Mark to ruminate on the challenger’s motivations or talk about Canada or Cruz’s mother or anything like what he said on his Radio program.
On Tuesday morning, I reposted your article entitled “Mark Levin Addresses Ted Cruz Eligibility Issue posed by Ridgewood Resident at Bookends Book Signing” to the conservative website FreeRepublic.Com. In order to do this, I had to register with FreeRepublic.Com. I gave my email address, and picked a screen name: ‘one guy in new jersey’.
The post was a hit. The reposted article has since garnered nearly 500 comments from Freepers in just two days! Most other posts are not getting more than 20-30 hits in that kind of time, so the topic definitely hit a nerve, particularly during a slow news week with plenty of people on vacation.
Many of the comments were submitted directly to me (‘one guy in new jersey’) as the original poster of the article, some of which expressed support for Cruz’s presidential aspiration, and some of which stated he was ineligible. I was busy responding to comment after comment on Tuesday afternoon and Tuesday evening, until something strange happened late Tuesday night as the total number of comments reached about 300. All of a sudden, I was prevented from responding to comments, or even posting any comments at all.
The reason given for this prohibition by the system? One word: “Troll”.
I responded to the webmaster, and to James Robinson, who runs the site, via email, thinking some mistake must have been made, and that it was just some strange automatic feature I got caught up in. I asked to have my capacity to enter comments and respond to comments sent to me. It’s been nearly two days now, and I’m still shut out. The comments to my reposted article have increased by two hundred since I was ‘banished’, so they must be wondering what happened to me!
Curious, I looked back through the thread comments, fifty at a time, and found they were salted throughout with comments from the site owner, James Robinson. Based on his personal comments, it is clear to me that Mr. Robinson has had it up to **here** with talk that Cruz is not eligible for the U.S. presidency. As I was answering the comments made to me, I steadily revealed myself to be an individual who strongly questions Ted Cruz’s POTUS eligibility. In fact, the ‘axe’ fell just while I was in the middle of diligently answering my many well-spoken interlocutors. What is the problem here? Is Mr. Robinson willing to silence fellow constitutional conservatives simply because they disagree with him on this one issue?
I understand Mark Levin is an active freeper (I can’t remember his screen name). I wonder whether he dropped dime on me to Mr. Robinson…
The citizenship status of Raphael Edwardo (Ted) Cruz was answered in US v Wong Kim Ark – 169 U.S. 649 [1898]. The Supreme Court has not overruled this opinion to date.
Every person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, becomes at once a citizen of the United States, and needs no naturalization. A person born out of the jurisdiction of the United States can only become a citizen by being naturalized, either by treaty, as in the case of the annexation of foreign territory, or by authority of Congress, exercised either by declaring certain classes of persons to be citizens, as in the enactments conferring citizenship upon foreign-born children of citizens , or by enabling foreigners individually to become citizens by proceedings in the judicial tribunals, as in the ordinary provisions of the naturalization acts. Justice Gray – US v Wong Kim Ark – 169 U.S. 649 [1898]