Does Iowa Republican platform committee know how to read?

Tuesday night I went to the meeting of the Polk County Republican Central Committee, where, due to a change in legal requirements (the Central Committee is the nominating body for county offices if there is a special election), I had to be chosen as one of the two members from my precinct who would remain members (three people had been elected at the February caucuses).

I've been a Central Committee member before, so I realized that there would be plenty of oddballs on the committee. It sort of comes with the teritory.

There were, of course, the usual assortment of Ron Paul supporters and other extremists of various descriptions. I knew that a disproportionate percentage of Iowa Republicans (and Democrats, for that matter- although for obvious reasons the media ignores it) are stone crazy. I expected a certain number of birthers to be involved, and truthers, and other mixed nuts. But I wasn't prepared for the news about the state party's proposed platform.

It seems that the platform states that “We believe candidates for President of the United States must show proof of being a ‘natural born citizen’ as required by Article II, Section I of the Constitution — beginning with the 2012 election.”

They already do, as a practical matter. And there is no reasonable doubt that President Obama is one.

If that were as far as it went, this would be a minor embarassment, the short of thing we might expect from the kind of whackadoodles who typically make up the Iowa Republican state platform committee. But it's worse. Much worse.

It seems that the committee's chairman, Don Ratcheter, says that "There are many Republicans who feel that Barack Obama is not a ‘natural born citizen’ because his father was not an American when he was born and, therefore, feel that according to the Constitution he’s not qualified to be president, should not have been allowed to be elected by the Electoral College or even nominated by the Democratic Party in 2008."

In which case, there are many Republicans who are blithering idiots, since the law clearly provides that any person who was born on American soil is a native-born American citizen even if NEITHER of his parents are citizens themselves.

Every election year, I think that the lunacy of Iowa Republicans cannot go any farther. And every election year, they prove me wrong. But this time, it's not a matter of mere lunacy. It's a matter of either sheer stupidity, or an inability to read.

Mind you, Iowa Democrats are just as crazy. Nowhere (other than a Ron Paul rally, of course) will you find a group of people more willing to believe that the United States is responsible for all the evil in the world, that George W. Bush is worse than Joseph Stalin, or that people should be free to marry their parakeets. But again, media bias is such that the lunacy of the Left generally isn't recognized as lunacy at all.

I don't know. Maybe it's a side-effect of us Iowans having to breathe the fumes of all that hog manure year in and year out that causes our party platforms to contain so much of it- and to make so many of our party activists so full of it.

Predictably, the Democrats and their allies in the media are crowing about this latest piece of stupidity. All we can hope is that somehow the full convention this June will come to its senses and get rid of this embarassment before the Democrats get to use it as a weapon in the Fall campaign.