Birthing a distraction

Barack Obama should release his birth certificate. But while he continues to hold out, the Birthers need to give it up.

I have watched with some perplexity as some continue to be fixated on this birth certificate "issue." It has been clanging around in the ether for so long now that I can't even recall verbatim all of the quotes that I have heard from various reliable sources that apply to this discussion.

I do remember the first serious column I read on Obama's birth certificate, by Ron Kessler of Newsmax. Newsmax is a conservative magazine with street cred and if you want to read his column "Obama Was Born In the United States", you can do so here. The element of this exposure that I find most noteworthy is that Philip Berg, the lawyer who initially brought the birth certificate lawsuit to court, is a certifiable wingnut who also believes that Bush and Cheney knew about and even orchestrated the events of 9/11 in advance of their occurrence.

Bill O'Reilly talked about the Birthers last week; his position is that they have a right to say what they want and focus on what they feel is worth their time, but that it is a closed issue. The Factor investigated it all at some point last year and found nothing worth pursuing.

I wish I had been jotting down notes back in January when I was in Louisville and caught Michael Medved's radio show for a few minutes. Medved did a masterful job of tracing the thread of all that would have had to take place, for no reason at that time, for Obama's mother to have gone to Kenya as a poor and very pregnant young woman just to give birth to her son. For what reason? So that he wouldn't be born in the United States? If so, why? This is how conspiracy theories collapse under their own weight.

Erick Erickson, who runs one of the best political blogs at www.redstate.com, very accurately labels this whole argument as a distraction. His thesis is that Obama may very well have a paper birth certificate, but that he is pursuing a dual strategy by toying with those who are obsessed with this issue and then hoping to brand all conservatives as angry maniacs that have their priorities out of sync.

Here is my final point: Even if Obama's birth certificate weren't legit, what happens at that time? Impeachment? That would never fly in this House of Representatives. It would be far more effective for all truly engaged citizens to zero in on Obama's policy failures, as well as weighing in with constitutional ideas for the future, rather than pursuing a goal that is ultimately hopeless. This is another Vince Foster smoking gun, to coin a Clinton-era incident; if any proof ever emerges, it will show that the Birthers had embarked on an ill-fated quest all along.