Obama Oath 2009

OBAMA'S OATH OF OFFICE 2009

By Gloria Merle Huffman

1/21/2009, 9/11-12/2012

768 words

Was Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., properly and legally sworn into office as President of the United States of America on Tuesday, January 20, 2009?

The correct presidential oath is as follows:

“I, [name], do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will, to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God.”

The 35-word oath is set forth in the Constitution. The last four words, “so help me God,” are not in the Constitution and are not required.

Colonel Potter gave the oath to Chief Justice John Roberts, who said to Obama, “I will [ ] execute the office of president TO the United States FAITHFULLY …”

The sole purpose of the inauguration was that one 39-word oath.

Is it possible that Obama the whiz kid, having given speech after speech from memory, without reference to the teleprompter, would not have memorized the shortest and most important speech of his life, the 39-word presidential oath of office? I, for one, thought he was The Wiz.

It is not a question of grammar, that the adverb “faithfully” still modified the verb “execute.” It is not a question of “intent rather than word perfection.” It is a sheer legal question of what constitutes the Constitutionally-required oath of office.

This is like a first step in dismantling the entire oath of office, because it establishes a precedent for other “minor” changes and rearrangements of the wording.

In the spirit of being prepared for the unexpected, I created a worst-case scenario for scrambling Obama’s oath of office, just in case he's re-elected in 2012 and the help he is given with his oath at the 2013 inauguration is worse than no help at all. This is as bad as it gets:

“I, the Junior Obama Hussein Barack, swear: I solemnly execute the president of United. So? God will faithfully defend and protect me. And the office of United states that the Constitution of Oz will best help preserve my ability to do the states.”

If the Constitution of Oz is so important, then by all means it should be found, especially since its existence is revealed by a slight reversal on half of the letters in the words "of of."

My search was short and fruitful. It's in the 1974 movie, Journey Back to Oz, based on L. Frank Baum's second Oz novel of 1904, The Marvelous Land of Oz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_Back_to_Oz [accessed 9/12/2012]). "The Scarecrow flips through the Constitution of Oz and reads a section that states that a visitor to there may return the way they came if similar transportation is available. After Dorothy reveals she came by cyclone, ... [they] form a tornado, which takes Dorothy and Toto back home." Easy enough. All on the simple formula of flip and reverse, as the dog Toto's own name could already have testified, if Dorothy had only known where to look for the primary source material for his name.

Meanwhile, back at the 2009 swearing-in ceremony, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “president TO the United States," not “president OF the United States." Knowing what we now know about the 1974 movie script for Journey Back to Oz, was there any difference between saying "TO" and saying "OF?" In a word, yes. Not only is "TO" grammatically incorrect in English in that spot, but "to" is the flip-and-reverse version of "of." As such, it is the formula for sending someone back to where they came from, particularly when arising from the word "OF" in the most extremely-scrambled form possible of the Constitutional oath for President of the United States ... scrambled so badly that it could have been done by a cyclone or tornado. The cue to reference this extreme makeover of the oath was Roberts' shifting of the word "faithfully" out of its normal position.

Could Chief Justice John Roberts have been telling Obama, "Go back to where you came from?"

Obama's reputed mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was said to be from Kansas, like Dorothy Gale of the Oz story, and Obama was said to have spent time in Kansas with his grandparents (if they were real people and not composites like the girlfriend in Obama's book, Dreams From My Father).

If Obama, like Dorothy with her beloved dog TOTO, is sent back to obscurity in Kansas, perhaps he will respond as Dorothy did in Journey Back to Oz as she was whisked home again in a whirlwind, "I'll be back! I promise you, I'll be back!"