I was talking yesterday with a Republican friend of mine and I cautiously asked “You’re not a Birther, are you?” “No,” he replied “but I wish Obama would just release his birth certificate so we could talk about other stuff, like how bad he’s screwed up the economy.”
From there I got a quick lesson in why Obama’s Certificate of Live Birth is not the same as a birth certificate and why Birthers are demanding the latter, much to Donald Trump’s delight. If only the President would stop being so glib and just release the birth certificate, my friend assured me that everyone would move on.
Boy was he wrong.
Today President Obama released the long form of his birth certificate, a document until now his administration claimed wasn’t available. Apparently they twisted some arms with some government officials in the state of Hawaii and got them to release this controversial document. My friend texted me and said “Finally. Now the mainstream media can move on.” But from the reports I’ve read this disclosure has done nothing to quell the Birthers’ insistence that Obama is ineligible to be President. All it really seems to have done is give Trump another reason to congratulate himself.
What will it take? The state of Hawaii proving its statehood? An affidavit from the newspaper publisher that ran Obama’s birth announcement? The truth is that nothing will silence the Birthers because they don’t care whether Obama is a U.S. citizen. I think what they really care about is that he’s black. And now that Obama has gone that extra step and produced—again—irrefutable proof of his citizenship, maybe the mainstream media will finally get the hint that this has nothing to do with citizenship and everything to do with race.
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