President Obama provided irrefutable evidence this past week that 25 percent of Americans, and 45 percent of Republicans, are blithering idiots.

Those are the percentages of both groups, according to to a recent CBS News/New York Times poll, who don’t believe the president was born in the U.S. and who therefore believe he is ineligible under the Constitution to hold the office.

Members of that group have held on to this belief despite the fact that President Obama has previously released his “certificate of live birth” from the state of Hawaii. They’ve held on to it despite the fact that the state officials responsible for public records have stated numerous times that the birth certificate is genuine.

They’ve held on to it despite the evidence that the archives of local papers from the time of President Obama’s birth show that birth announcements ran in those papers of a son born to Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama of 6085 Kalanianaole Highway in Honolulu.

Nothing will satisfy us, the so-called “Birthers” insisted, but the “long-form” birth certificate, something which I’ll wager the vast majority of Americans had never even heard of until the Birthers turned it into the gold standard for proving you were One of Us.

“Obama isn’t an American citizen” has become one of those Zombie Lies, the ones that just won’t die. When one right-wing politician ends up being forced to admit that yes, he or she actually believes that Barack Obama is, indeed, an American (which they usually do only after being cornered like a rat in a trap), another one springs up, ready to start the whole tedious process over again.

The media bear a great deal of the responsibility here, because they’ve given a platform, not only to what the president described as “carnival barkers,” but also to enough kooks, charlatans, hucksters and grifters to staff a dozen sideshows, and all under the guise of being “objective.”

Make no mistake: There are some statements and positions that, in a rational world, would entitle you to nothing more than being mocked and jeered like a sideshow geek. Calls of “Where’s the birth certificate!?” mark you as a clown just as clearly as if you were wearing a red nose and big shoes, and any news outlet who gives any hearing whatsoever to that sort of nonsense ought to just admit that they’re just there to entertain, hire some tigers and elephants, and start broadcasting from under a big striped tent.

You want proof that there’s no such thing as the “liberal media”? Liberal media wouldn’t show people like Orly Taitz or Donald Trump spouting their drivel without a laugh track running underneath it.

Finally, President Obama did what he does far too often, in my opinion: He caved in to the demands of the crazies. He released the “long-form birth certificate” they’d been demanding. It showed, as everyone sane already knew, that he was born right here in the good old U.S. of A.

Did that settle the matter? Of course not. Nothing will ever satisfy the wingnuts, and Obama was foolish to try. Remember that, to the obsessed conspiracy theorist, any evidence that contradicts the the theory is itself part of the conspiracy.

Cries of “forgery!” went up from the swamps of the right wing blogosphere, with one blogger purporting to have proved the inauthenticity of the document by examining it online. Ask any legitimate document examiner if such a thing is possible, and see how long it takes him or her to stop laughing.

Some took the path of sheer chutzpah, like GOP Chairman Rance Priebus.

“Unfortunately,” Priebus sniffed, “[the president’s] campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our No. 1 priority — our economy.”

Well, Rance old son, maybe if you’d shown some of that “leadership” you people are always on about and helped quash this lunacy in your own party, including some of your potential nominees like “Mau Mau Mike” Huckabee, we wouldn’t have had to go through this rigmarole. If this twit beaned the president with a baseball, he’d complain about the time it took to put a bandage on the wound.

Then, of course, there’s the time-honored tactic of moving the goalposts, like CNN commentator Erick Erickson, founder of the right-wing blog RedState.

“Once the birth certificate issue is dispatched,” Erickson wrote, “will he release his college transcripts? That’s the issue for me.”

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.

Dusty Rhoades lives, writes and practices law in Carthage. Contact him at dustyr@nc.rr.com.

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SamSewell 2 years ago

New AKA Obama BC fake - Prove it to yourself

http://thesteadydrip.blogspot.com/2011/04/new-aka-obama-bc-fake-prove-it-to.html

Dr. Polland’s Analysis of the Certificate of Live Birth Released on April 27, 2011 The morons forget to flatten the layers! You should see what this looks like in Photoshop or any other Adobe program that reads PDF’s and works with layers.

SamSewell 2 years ago

Sam Sewell 11:56pm Apr 30

Besides, scanned documents aren't evidence of anything even if the are legitimate. The entire reason there is a professional field known as forensic document examination is that a great deal can be told from examination of the original document itself. Much, much less can be told by looking at a photocopy of a document and very little, if anything at all, can be told from looking at a digital image that purports to be an image of an original document. Too much opportunity for adulteration, no opportunity to examine the paper, the ink, any impressions made on the paper, etc. These online arguments discussing images (especially photographic images) are like people studying animals by examining imitation scat.

Ross 2 years ago

As this author says - Zombies are all over the place - right sammy?

SH59 2 years ago

Sam, I hope your 3AM rantings are just a joke and you're having fun with this. You must know to suggest there has been a conspiracy to cover up citizenship from the time Obama was born is just crazy and psychotic! People who are so focused on this are just happy to have their heads in the sand and don't really want to deal with the real world.

SnakeFlag1 2 years ago

If the posted birth certificate is real, it settled the controversy. He was born to a father who is a British citizen. If he was adopted in by his Indonesian father, add another layer of foreign citizenship. If he went to Pakistan on a passport other than American at a time when Americans were forbidden to travel to Pakistan, add another layer. President is the only office in the United States where one instance of foreign citizenship disqualifies you from office.

SH59 2 years ago

So Sam, I've been doing a little research on you. Now I get it, you really have created your own world of reality! It's funny how anyone can create a blog and say whatever they want. Just because you've created the Steady Drip to support your deluded thoughts it doesn't mean there's any truth to what you say. Anyone who's devoted that much time and energy to develop such an unsupported convoluted and twisted story as the one you have on your Intellectual Conservative web site must suffer grandiose dreams of fame and recognition. Who's to say you haven't manipulated the Birth Certificate you posted on your own site?

The Zombie Lies That Won't Die

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