Thursday, April 28, 2011

Where's the Proof?


The greatest threat to our nation is no more!
WASHINGTON -- The White House released on Wednesday President Barack Obama's "long form" birth certificate, the document whose absence has long been at the heart of the conspiracy-riddled discussion over Obama's legitimacy to serve as the nation's commander in chief.

The move came as a surprise to the press corps, many of whom had not shown up for Wednesday's early-morning White House briefing. By the time word had spread that Obama would be making a 9:45 a.m. statement on the matter, however, the top anchors at all the networks had scurried into the briefing room.

Once there, they received a presidential scolding for their concern with "silliness." Obama began his five-minute statement with the complaint that he wouldn't be able to get the networks to break into their regularly scheduled programming for a speech on policy proposals.

"I know that there is going to be a segment of people for which no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest," Obama said. "But I am speaking for the vast majority of the American people as well as for the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We have better stuff to do. I have got better stuff to do. We have got big problems to solve."

"We are not going to be able to do it if we are distracted, we are not going to be able to do it if we spend time vilifying each other ... if we just make stuff up and pretend that facts are not facts, we are not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by side shows and carnival barkers," the president declared earlier.

The document released by the White House differs from the one that Obama's aides made public during the 2008 presidential campaign. Instead of a "certification" of live birth, this was a "certificate," clearly recording that the president was born on Aug. 4, 1961 in the Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu.

For years, Obama's circle of aides had resisted calls to make the latter form public, noting that a certification is legally sound and what any citizen of Hawaii receives upon requesting documents of birth. And indeed, for some time, that explanation -- supported by a a wide swath of other contemporaneous evidence - seemed to suffice.

But some who challenged the president's citizenship remained unsatisfied, and in recent weeks they found a high-profile megaphone for their cause: business tycoon and presidential flirt Donald Trump.
Well, thank god that's behind us. Although this hasn't ever been an issue for anyone with a brain, and people who believed in this bullshit before aren't going to change just because he's offered more proof.

The fact that Obama even wasted his time responding to shit like this is mildly annoying.

The fact that a clearly racist conspiracy theory has gotten enough media attention that it got a response from the White House is depressing on so many levels it's hard to quantify. Baratunde Thurston (Jack Turner of the great Jack and Jill Politics) posted an unbelievably moving response to the press conference that captured much of that emotion, and is very much worth watching.

1 comment:

  1. one word...photoshop...ok, two words, sort of. maybe one if capitalized or hyphenated. but, you say it like it is one. i'm pretty sure adobe bought the rights to make it one word. in any case, VALIDITY-BURN(one word)!

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