Thus, the New York Times questions John McCain’s presidential eligibility.

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

[…]

Mr. McCain was born on a military installation in the Canal Zone, where his mother and father, a Navy officer, were stationed. His campaign advisers say they are comfortable that Mr. McCain meets the requirement and note that the question was researched for his first presidential bid in 1999 and reviewed again this time around.

But given mounting interest, the campaign recently asked Theodore B. Olson, a former solicitor general now advising Mr. McCain, to prepare a detailed legal analysis. “I don’t have much doubt about it,” said Mr. Olson, who added, though, that he still needed to finish his research.

We at Shallow Nation are not constitutional scholars, but we think this is rather ironic:

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and one of Mr. McCain’s closest allies, said it would be incomprehensible to him if the son of a military member born in a military station could not run for president.

“He was posted there on orders from the United States government,” Mr. Graham said of Mr. McCain’s father. “If that becomes a problem, we need to tell every military family that your kid can’t be president if they take an overseas assignment.”

After all, it is not as if his parents were on vacation. Which might in some future Presidential race bring up another question: what would the Founding Fathers have to say about a premature birth of a would-be American citizen whose mother happened to be vacationing in a foreign land?

Well, we are not constitutional scholars and we can’t offer much to resolve the John McCain birthplace controversy but we did seize the opportunity to find this charming 1934 documentary on the construction of the Panama Canal.