David Weigel debunks a video that has never been bunked in the first place.

Is there anyone who has ever thought that this was anything but a joke?

Crooks and Liars is laughing at the "morons" who believe they're looking at "actual footage of Barack Obama's birth taking place in a hospital in Kenya." But as far as I can tell, they are morons for believing they are looking at actual morons who believe they are looking at actual footage....

He who laughs at morons should look to it that he himself does not become a moron. And when you gaze long into the idiocracy the idiocracy also gazes into you.

What were we talking about just before Cory Booker became the topic of the moment?

See, there is the question you need to ask if you want to figure out whether the gaffe was really a gaffe. Stop and think. Do you even remember?

I had to look back at my stream of blog posts. The topic of the moment was: Obama seems to have claimed to have been born in Kenya: Why did he do that?

Just before that it was gay marriage.

So, you tell me: Do you think Booker was serving a deliberate purpose, in league with the Obama campaign, and not — as Chris Matthews put it — sabotage and betrayal?

What was Booker really doing?
	Carrying out an Obama campaign mission to change the subject.
	Serving his own interests at the expense of the Obama campaign. [This includes just honestly saying what he really thinks.]
	Screwing up.
pollcode.com free polls

"Friends, Romans, countrymen..."

This amused me. Cowboy style. I ran across it because I was looking for the text to the famous Mark Antony speech, which I'd been forced to memorize in junior high school, many decades ago. (Here's Marlon Brando doing it, not amusingly.) And what got me testing my own memory was something I'd just read about Barack Obama, which someone had emailed me, a propos of the recent "born in Kenya" dustup. It's a GQ article from November 2009 called "Barack Obama's Work in Progress."

Over the past few years, we’ve gotten to know our president as a lot of different things: campaigner, lawyer, father, basketballer. But what if Obama’s first and truest calling—his desire to write—explains more about him than anything else? Robert Draper recounts the untold story of the first man since Teddy Roosevelt to serve as author in chief.

I haven't combed through that whole article looking for the Kenya connections, but I noticed this bit about Shakespeare:

Sometime in 2002, the young state senator pays a daytime visit to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. The artistic director, Barbara Gaines, is happy to show the politician around. Watching the carpenters erect the set, he asks Gaines which play is about to be performed. “Julius Caesar,” she tells him.

At first, Obama doesn’t say anything. Then, in a very soft voice, he begins to recite some twenty lines from the play. As he does so, he places his hand on his heart, as if stricken by the words’ transcendent beauty.

The director is agog. She has never heard an elected official quote Shakespeare in such a way.

Now, wait a minute. Who, upon mention of "Julius Caesar," doesn't start going "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me you ears..."? If it was some other 20 lines from the play, I might be impressed. The fact that he went on for 20 lines is sort of cool as a demonstration of memory. It's more than I can do without missing some words, but then, I learned it during the LBJ administration. But who goes on for 20 lines, putting on a memory show? Maybe you would if you saw that you were getting the director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater agog.

And would you put your hand on your heart? (Cf., Obama not putting his hand over his heart during the National Anthem.)

Back to GQ:

Later, she tells a co-worker, “I just had the most amazing experience. I met the first politician to have the soul of a poet.” (The first, she means, since Abe Lincoln, who quoted lines from Macbeth less than a week before his assassination: I think our country sinks beneath the yoke…)

The soul of a poet. Doesn't anyone remember Eugene McCarthy?



Many women loved this Senator from Minnesota, who challenged LBJ in 1968, and the poetry was part of it. My maternal grandmother loved him because he was a poet. 1968 — there was a year. Bobby Kennedy pushes Senator McCarthy — the good Senator McCarthy — aside, LBJ declines to run, Martin Luther King is shot down, 2 months later Bobby follows him, and Nixon becomes inevitable.

By the way, speaking of MacBeth and LBJ, they made a play back then: MacBird!



The playwright, Barbara Garson said:

"People used to ask me then, 'Do you really think Johnson killed Kennedy?'... I never took that seriously. I used to say to people, 'If he did, it's the least of his crimes.' It was not what the play was about. The plot was a given."

Why would Obama pretend to have been born in Kenya?

I asked this question the other day, when Breitbart broke the news of that literary agent's brochure that said Obama was born in Kenya. I said:

Where's the advantage in being seen as African African? It certainly isn't a way to get affirmative action from law school admissions and appointments committees. They may crudely care mainly about the way their classrooms look and take advantage of African African applicants, but the theories of affirmative action (especially the legal ones) have to do with black people who come from the American culture with its history of discrimination, prejudice, and disadvantage.

Mark Steyn has a good answer: Obama had reason not to want to be seen as having been born in Hawaii:

After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title “Journeys in Black and White,” being born in Hawaii doesn’t really help. It’s entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance — American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury-vacation destination and nothing else. Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man’s rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents.

That reminds me of what Rush Limbaugh said yesterday: "Maybe this business he was born in Kenya, maybe it was just compression, you know, like his girlfriend in the book.  Maybe he was just writing it himself as a composite." But Rush's bigger point was:

If you're Barack Obama, wouldn't you rather... people get all absorbed and sidetracked on some blurb in a literary pitch years and years ago?  I can see Obama and his boys sitting in the White House saying, "You know, let's have some fun with the birthers. Let's go ahead and release this thing...." 

Obama's literary agent used the "born in Kenya" bio from 1991 to 2007.

If it was a mistake, why did it go uncorrected for so long? You could say: That's how sloppy this literary agency is and how inattentive people are to brochures like this. I still wonder how that particular mistake got made. Why would you drift into thinking an American woman gave birth in a foreign country? That is, why would you guess at a fact and guess what is unlikely?

What are the other options? One is that Obama wanted to be thought of as having been born in Kenya, and he deliberately put out false information. Why would he want that? It's not advantageous to his political career, and we know that, if anything, he sought to embed himself more deeply in American culture by going to Chicago and working with poor black people, by attending Jeremiah Wright's church, and even — it's indelicate to say so — by marrying Michelle.

Where's the advantage in being seen as African African? It certainly isn't a way to get affirmative action from law school admissions and appointments committees. They may crudely care mainly about the way their classrooms look and take advantage of African African applicants, but the theories of affirmative action (especially the legal ones) have to do with black people who come from the American culture with its history of discrimination, prejudice, and disadvantage.

Considering that, you might jump to (or closer to) the conclusion that Obama really was born in Kenya. I'm not going there. How would Stanley Ann have traveled to Kenya when she was 18 and pregnant? Where would she have gotten the money? She had a lot of nerve, but would she have thrown herself halfway across the world to put herself, in her most vulnerable time, in a third world hospital? I don't believe it.

I'm as convinced as I need to be that Obama was not born in Kenya. (And I think that, even if he was, he's eligible to be President, since he was an American citizen at birth, being born to an American woman who happened to be traveling.) I'm interested in the possibility that Obama wanted to be thought of as having been born in Kenya. But I'm not going to think that unless I can understand his motivation. As I said above, it would not help him get affirmative action or any mainstream political advantage — quite the opposite. Let's explore the possible motivations: a feeling of alienation from the United States, a desire to connect more deeply to his African roots, a preference for African-style left-wing politics over the American political tradition, perhaps some belief that it's noble to be from Africa.

I can see a way to build a psychic profile of the Obama who dreams of being more truly African. It was in 1989 — 2 years before the publication of the brochure — that Jesse Jackson led a movement to get us to stop saying "black" and start saying "African-American." Here's a contemporaneous NYT article:

The term, used for years in intellectual circles, is gaining currency among many other blacks, who say its use is a sign that they are accepting their difficult past and resolving a long ambivalence toward Africa....

For many, the issue is already settled, not only in their minds but in their hearts. ''Whenever I go to Africa,'' said Roger Wilkins, a senior fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, ''I feel like a person with a legitimate place to stand on this earth. This is the name for all the feelings I've had all these years.''...

Leaders of the movement... say they want to shift the definition of the group from the racial description black to a cultural and ethnic identity that ties the group to its continent of origin and fosters dignity and self-esteem.

''This is deeper than just name recognition,'' said Mr. Jackson who, along with others, called for the change at a news conference in late December. ''Black tells you about skin color and what side of town you live on. African-American evokes discussion of the world.''...

Hilda Whittington, a Chicago lawyer, has been calling herself an African-American since Mr. Jackson's remarks last month and is now planning a trip to West Africa next year. ''After thinking about it, I kind of like it,'' Mrs. Whittington said. ''We should call ourselves African-Americans and get it over with. This is it for me.''...

Now a term that was once considered militant is going mainstream. '''African-American' reflects a post-modern black consciousness,'' said Dr. Roderick Watts, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale University, who last year founded a community group with the name the Association of Agencies Serving African-Americans. ''It has a self-affirming quality that seems to fit right now.''

Nevertheless, I believe the most likely answer is that "born in Kenya" was a mistake, made by some literary agency underling, in a brochure that never inspired close reading, even as the years passed. I mean, there are things in Obama's book that you could pull out today and surprise people with. I was doing that last week. And that book is sitting there in plain sight. Really, it's quite amazing the things we don't notice that are right in front of us.

"What do you think? I've resisted all the birther stuff for the last four years."

"But this looks like something else - something in the zone of Elizabeth Warren checking the box for Native American followed by unchecking the box."

Meade starts a conversation over at Isthmus (where they basically loathe him).

ADDED: The people over there in the Isthmus forum don't understand that Meade is quoting a brochure from Obama's literary agent. They think he's just bringing up the old "birther" controversy. The dumbness is deep.

The 8 ghosts that haunt "Dreams From My Father."

This is the second in a series of posts based on the search for a single word in Barack Obama's memoir "Dreams From My Father." I'm proceeding intuitively, choosing a word, and taking advantage of the searchable Kindle text. In Saturday's post, the word was "faceless," chosen because I'd found it striking that Obama had used that word to describe the white children who'd taunted him and led him to be cruel to a little black girl he called Coretta. I found 2 other occurrences of "faceless," and one involved a poor black woman he called Ruby. She was not the faceless one. What was faceless was an image of white people contained within — "buried deep within" — black people who had developed their own identity around "a very particular experience with hate."

Obama portrayed black people as having an inner white person, and he wondered "whether the bonds of community could be restored without collectively exorcising that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams." So that inner white person wasn't real. It was a ghost — a ghost that haunted dreams. The book is "Dreams From My Father," so it's quite significant to find the notion of dreams haunted by white people, and white people conceptualized as ghosts.

So I have selected "ghost" as my word for this second post in the series. I consult my Kindle text and discover there are 8 ghosts in "Dreams From My Father." The inner white-person ghost that distorts the identity of black people like Ruby is Ghost #4. I'll tell you about the other 7 ghosts, but first I want to remind you of another memoir in a genre we might call: minority identity in the midst of white people. That book is  "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts," by Maxine Hong Kingston, which that came out in 1975.  I'm rather sure Obama knew this book, because Kingston moved to Hawaii in 1967, where Obama lived from 1961-1962, 1963-1967, and 1971-1979. According to the short bio in the Kindle version of "The Woman Warrior," Kingston has been awarded "rare title of 'Living Treasure of Hawai’i.'"

What were these "ghosts" Kingston wrote about in her memoir? They were the people who were not of her race (which was Chinese). Born in 1940, one year after her mother moved to America, Kingston described her perception of Americans with the ghost metaphor:

But America has been full of machines and ghosts—Taxi Ghosts, Bus Ghosts, Police Ghosts, Fire Ghosts, Meter Reader Ghosts, Tree Trimming Ghosts, Five-and-Dime Ghosts. Once upon a time the world was so thick with ghosts, I could hardly breathe; I could hardly walk, limping my way around the White Ghosts and their cars. There were Black Ghosts too, but they were open eyed and full of laughter, more distinct than White Ghosts....

If Obama had over-indulged his propensity to call white people ghosts, he might have seemed too much like Maxine Hong Kingston, and he could not have conveyed the thoughtful, hopeful vibe about race that worked so well for him in the 2008 election season. "Ghost" appears in "The Woman Warrior" far more than 100 times. (A Kindle search maxes out at 100.) There are only 8 "ghosts" in "Dreams From My Father." We have seen #4. Let's encounter the rest.

Ghost #1 is Obama himself, in the introduction, imagining how others see him as "the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds":

[S]ome people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose—the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife’s six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it’s on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down … well, I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns. Or worse, I sound like I’m trying to hide from myself.

Is the ghost the white component that he perceives in himself? He doesn't say that. He imagines other people thinking about him. Are those imagined other people seeing his white half as a ghost? He doesn't say that. The ghost is "the tragic mulatto," both black and white, but he disowns that "image." It's in the heads of "people who don’t know me well, black or white," but it's an image that forms — he thinks — when they find out that his mother is white, which is something he admits withholding from people. He withholds — avoids "advertis[ing]" — because he suspects that he is seeking to ingratiate himself with whites. When they find out about the white mother, they see him as a ghost trapped between 2 worlds, but he wants them to know that the tragedy belongs to all Americans — or, that is, he thinks about rambling and ranting about how the tragedy belongs to all Americans and then he brings himself up short with the notion that he sounds like a college-town Communist.

Ghost #2 appears as an adjective — "ghostly" — used to describe the skin of a black man who used skin lightener, whom Obama claims to have seen in a photograph in Life magazine (though I've read that there really was no such photograph in Life). Obama's mother has taken the young boy to the library, where he's come across a collection of old Life magazines.

Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. I couldn’t guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the subject. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man’s hands. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man’s crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad, fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.

He must be terribly sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino — albino—I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn’t it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who’d undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.

I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this?

"Ghostly" describes the color achieved by a black man who tried to become white. It's an unpleasant look, the result of delusion and oppression. It's the bad dream of becoming white. A black man imagined he could "pass" as white and that would make him happy, but it didn't work, and he feels regret. He feels regret and Obama feels sick, and Obama wonders whether his white mother understands. She brought him to the safe environs of the library, but he found a clue of the suffering that's out there in the world.

I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.

It seems that he withdrew into whiteness, to walk home quietly with his white mother, into his white life. But the fear was implanted, that his outward life of whiteness was a sickly, ghostly pallor. Understood this way, Ghost #2 is also Obama, as he identifies with the deluded black man who attempted to recolor his skin.

Ghost #3 is Obama's father, as Obama, the young man, experiences disillusionment:

All my life, I had carried a single image of my father, one that I had sometimes rebelled against but had never questioned, one that I had later tried to take as my own. The brilliant scholar, the generous friend, the upstanding leader—my father had been all those things. All those things and more, because except for that one brief visit in Hawaii, he had never been present to foil the image, because I hadn’t seen what perhaps most men see at some point in their lives: their father’s body shrinking, their father’s best hopes dashed, their father’s face lined with grief and regret....

Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by … what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost! For a moment I felt giddy; if Auma hadn’t been in the room, I would have probably laughed out loud. The king is overthrown, I thought. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. The rabble of my head is free to run riot; I can do what I damn well please. 

The idealized man, the father, didn't really exist. He was nothing more than a ghost. Obama finds that liberating — to be free of the role model. The emerald curtain is pulled aside. There is no great and powerful Oz. The king is overthrown... and the rabble in his head — the revolutionaries — run riot. But then: "The night wore on," and the feeling of liberation faded. He fretted: "Who might protect me from doubt or warn me against all the traps that seem laid in a black man’s soul?" So Ghost #3 is not a white person. It is the absence of a father, the father image he had clung to, now dissipated. 

Ghost #5 appears in Kenya, where Obama has traveled to encounter his extended family. Obama is walking in the city with his half-sister Auma:

Auma and I happened to run into an acquaintance of the Old Man’s outside Barclay’s Bank. I could tell that Auma didn’t remember his name, so I held out my hand and introduced myself. The man smiled and said, “My, my—you have grown so tall. How’s your mother? And your brother Mark—has he graduated from university yet?” 

At first I was confused. Did I know this person? And then Auma explained in a low voice that no, I was a different brother, Barack, who grew up in America, the child of a different mother. David had passed away. And then the awkwardness on all sides—the man nodding his head (“I’m sorry, I didn’t know”) but taking another look at me, as if to make sure what he’d heard was true; Auma trying to appear as if the situation, while sad, was somehow the normal stuff of tragedy; me standing to the side, wondering how to feel after having been mistaken for a ghost.

Ghost #5 is David... or Obama himself, appearing to be David, the half-brother he never knew and never could know, the lost family connection.

Ghost #6 rises up in a dream he has in Africa:

I finally fell asleep, and dreamed I was walking along a village road. Children, dressed only in strings of beads, played in front of the round huts, and several old men waved to me as I passed. But as I went farther along, I began to notice that people were looking behind me fearfully, rushing into their huts as I passed. I heard the growl of a leopard and started to run into the forest, tripping over roots and stumps and vines, until at last I couldn’t run any longer and fell to my knees in the middle of a bright clearing. Panting for breath, I turned around to see the day turned night, and a giant figure looming as tall as the trees, wearing only a loincloth and a ghostly mask. The lifeless eyes bored into me, and I heard a thunderous voice saying only that it was time, and my entire body began to shake violently with the sound, as if I were breaking apart …. 

I jerked up in a sweat, hitting my head against the wall lamp that stuck out above the bunk. In the darkness, my heart slowly evened itself, but I couldn’t get back to sleep again.

This ghost seems to embody all of his fears, but perhaps represents his father. We get the description of body heat and visceral disorder as in the library scene, and a lighting fixture plays a supporting role, as in the "emerald curtain" scene. This dream — a literal dream in a book called "Dreams" — seems to express his difficulty finding his place in Africa.

Ghost #7 is a simile used by Obama's great uncle, in this scene that takes place in Kenya:

His hair was snow-white, his skin like parchment. He was motionless, his eyes closed, his fleshless arms propped on the armrests of his chair. I thought perhaps he was asleep, but when Billy stepped forward the old man’s head tilted in our direction, and I saw a mirror image of the face I’d seen yesterday in Alego, in the faded photograph on Granny’s wall. Billy explained who was there, and the old man nodded and began to speak in a low, quaking voice that seemed to rise out of a chamber beneath the floor. “He says that he is glad you have come,” Roy translated. “He was your grandfather’s brother. He wishes you well.” I said that I was happy to see him, and the old man nodded again.

“He says that many young men have been lost to … the white man’s country. He says his own son is in America and has not come home for many years. Such men are like ghosts, he says. When they die, no one will be there to mourn them. No ancestors will be there to welcome them. So … he says it is good that you have returned.” The old man raised his hand and I shook it gently. As we got up to leave, the old man said something else, and Roy nodded his head before closing the door behind us. “He says that if you hear of his son,” Roy explained, “you should tell him that he should come home.”

Here, the ghost is — as the old man tells it — the black man lost to the white man’s country. Obama's great uncle is speaking specifically about his own son, a man who was born in Africa, who needs to come home and to stay connected to his family so he will be mourned when he dies. Despite the reference to death, the condition of being a ghost occurs during life, wandering about in "the white man's country." Does that make Obama a ghost too, since he lives in America, where he was born, and which must be his home? Obama lacks even the definition of being the African man who has on his our relocated to the white man's country and who could come home to the embrace of the African ancestors. He's gone there, to Africa, but is it home for him? Is America not his country?

What happens next in that scene is that everyone drinks a lot of moonshine, and...

Old faces and young faces all glow like jack-o’-lanterns in the shifting lamplight, laughing and shouting, slumped in dark corners or gesticulating wildly for cigarettes or another drink, anger or joy pitching up to a crest, then just as quickly ebbing away, words of Luo and Swahili and English running together in unrecognizable swirls, the voices wheedling for money or shirts or the bottle, the voices laughing and sobbing, the outstretched hands, the faltering angry voices of my own sodden youth, of Harlem and the South Side; the voices of my father.

That's a long sentence! What's going on there? Unrecognizable swirls. Everyone but the brooding Obama seems to dissolve into drunken chaos. No more ghosts, but the people look like jack-o’-lanterns — they become surreal and ghoulish. And yet, he identifies with them, in an alienated way: They are "my own sodden youth."

The final ghost, Ghost #8, is another simile. We're still in Kenya:

On the last weekend of my stay, Auma and I took the train to the coast and stayed at an old beachfront hotel in Mombasa that had once been a favorite of the Old Man’s. It was a modest, clean place, in August filled mostly with German tourists and American sailors on shore leave. We didn’t do much, just read and swam and walked along the beach, watching pale crabs scurry like ghosts into their sandy holes.

Pale crabs, like ghosts, scurry into holes in the beach. Here's a picture of a Mombasa sand crab. Is there any symbolism here? Maybe Obama just walked on the beach one time with Auma. But it's his father's place, and it's a place that sounds as though it's full of white people — Germans and Americans — who presumably went swimming and sunning on that beach. But Auma and Obama looked at the white crabs, who were like ghosts, and they didn't even see the white people, who were, then — one could say — even more ghostly than the ghosts.

That Corsi book?

"There is no book."

Birtherism and racism.

John McWhorter and Glenn Loury talk it out. The diavlog begins with McWhorter asserting that birtherism is not about race:

Will no one shed a tear for Jerome Corsi?

Corsi wrote the much promoted book: "Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President."

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #36 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Law > One-L
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Government
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Law > Constitutional Law

#1 in Constitutional Law? Does that hurt, o fellow conlawprofs? Check out the rest of the list? How far down do you have to go before you see a book on constitutional law that you respect? But anyway... who can pity Corsi? He got his #1 book. But no, the book won't be released until May 17, so everyone who's put in an order for the book, everyone who made that book #1, should go right into their Amazon account and delete the book. Or will the publisher find a way to withdraw it and redo it so that it becomes super-timely? Some new chapter espousing some trumped up conspiracy theory about the birth certificate and its release.

James Taranto got me thinking about Corsi:

Jerome Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President" has an official release date of May 17. Corsi must be wishing he'd pushed the date up to yesterday...

Presumably Obama could have made this request [Hawaii's Department of Health] at any time, so why now?...

It's an amusing thought if an idle one that perhaps Obama did this just to stick it to Corsi, whose book reportedly hit No. 1 on Amazon after Drudge promoted it. John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking former junior senator from Massachusetts who by the way served in Vietnam, is probably smiling. After all, Corsi was co-author, with John O'Neill, of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry."

But Kerry really was unfit for command, whereas contrary to Corsi's new book, Obama, fit or not, is legally qualified to be president. "We don't have time for such silliness," Obama said at his briefing today. Then, as John Podhoretz notes, the president "flew off to Chicago to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show."

The NYT calls the "birther" issue "a baseless attack with heavy racial undertones."

The editors want to make sure you see the issue as racial:

[T]he birther question was never really about citizenship; it was simply a proxy for those who never accepted the president’s legitimacy, for a toxic mix of reasons involving ideology, deep political anger and, most insidious of all, race....

It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious “other” would have been conducted against a white president.

Inconceivable? Really?

There was a price to the party for keeping the issue alive; inevitably, it was picked up by a cartoon candidate, Donald Trump, who rode birtherism directly to the prime-time promontories of cable TV. The Republican establishment began to wince as it became increasingly tied to Mr. Trump’s flirtations with racial provocation, and Karl Rove told him to knock it off.

Oh! The evil Karl Rove is back... seemingly as a measure of how much more evil the birthers are.

"... Obama's political handlers decided to cauterize The Donald sideshow with a nifty piece of political choreography..."

"...releasing the 'long-form' birth certificate the very day Trump was wooing voters in New Hampshire."

Says The Daily News, crediting Obama with brilliant timing. Given the pro-Obama slant to the article, the poll in the sidebar over there has 74% of poll-takers saying the "birther" controversy is not over. Screen cap, just now:

"The White House released President Obama's original birth certificate Wednesday."

"The surprise release follows recent and sustained remarks by businessman Donald Trump, among others, that raised doubts as to whether the president was born in the United States."

Trump gets results. So... is there anything surprising on it to suggest why this controversy wasn't nipped in the bud?

ADDED: See it and marvel!!!

AND: So it says "Certificate of Live Birth" at the top. Is this still the "short form" and not the "long form" that the "birthers" say they want?

ALSO: This is — according to the NYT — the "long form."

“Over the last two and a half years, I have watched with bemusement,” [Obama] said in brief remarks. “I’ve been puzzled by the degree to which this thing just kept on going.”

Mr. Obama said there would be a “segment of people for which, no matter what we put out, this issue will not be put to rest.” But he said that he was “speaking to the vast majority of the American people as well as to the press. We do not have time for this kind of silliness.”

Extra points to Obama for correct use of (a form of) the frequently misused word "bemused."

AND: Let me answer my own question. I'd say, the reason Obama did not release the long-form birth certificate before is that he thought it was to his advantage to allow other people to look bad or crazy in one way or another by going on in the birtherist mode. But there was a tipping point, as Trump got traction and polls showed huge numbers of Americans entertaining doubts. So, it was all political strategy. You could criticize Obama for wasting our time by not just releasing the damned thing earlier. But he could have thought it was demeaning to have to do this, so I'm inclined to give him a pass.

Drudge goes all out promoting Jerome Corsi's birther book.

The book — to be published next month  — is "Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President." It's Drudge's top headline, linking to this:

... Jerome Corsi, the man who torpedoed John Kerry's presidential dreams with SWIFT BOAT, has gone underground and is holding his new findings thisclose.

"It's utterly devastating," reveals a source close to the publisher. "Obama may learn things he didn't even know about himself!"

Well, no one has first-hand knowledge of his own birth, so excuse me if I don't get all excited about that. Obama's mother was obviously an American citizen. I'm not too interested in the technical details beyond that. Me, a law professor! I'm satisfied that he's eligible to be President. The argument that he doesn't have the American values you think a President must have should be made directly.

Drudge notes that the book was "#1,341 on AMAZON's hitparade late Wednesday morning." It's #6 right now. Soon to be #1, presumably. You've got to give Corsi credit for knowing how to rake in cash. Which reminds me: If you want to read that book, please buy it through my link, above, not Drudge's. Because I'm never going to write a book that people get all jazzed about. Book commerce belongs to guys like Corsi.

UPDATE, 15 minutes after posting: The book is up to #2 on Amazon. I'm not suggesting that's because ot this post, of course. It's Drudge-power.

"[T]he less we hear about the birth certificate from this point forward, the better chances I gather that this is real."

Says Mediate, summarizing Trump's interview with Rush Limbaugh. (17-minute audio at the link.)

The conversation broached many subjects and, while it was a good interview, perhaps the most interesting note is what they didn’t talk about. Not once during the call did the subject of President Obama’s birth come up. Trump’s investigators in Hawaii must feel so insulted.

Mediate doesn't realize that this was Trump's second interview on Rush's show. I can't get the search function on RushLimbaugh.com to work anymore for some reason, but the previous interview was a couple weeks ago, and they did go through the whole birther thing then.

My impression, from listening to both Rush-Trump interviews, is that Trump's main issue is the way the Chinese are hurting American business interests (including Trump's own interests). On yesterday's show, this was Trump's most passionate moment:

Rush, if we ever wanted them to stop manipulating their currency, which makes it almost impossible for our companies to compete -- and I know because I build buildings, and I have to get so much stuff whether it's curtain walls or other things from China, and I hate do it. But they manipulate their currency to such an extent that it's very hard, almost impossible for our companies to compete; and if you ever said to them, "Folks, the game is over." You know, we're rebuilding China, Rush. We're rebuilding China. They're building bridges like twice the size of the George Washington Bridge.

The George Washington Bridge is like a small bridge. They are building airports, they're building cities, with our money -- and it's mostly from us because we have leadership that doesn't know what they're doing. If you ever said to them, "There's a 25% tax, a 25% tax on all of your products coming in," we would, first of all, never really probably have to oppose the tax because they would come to the table -- if you meant it, if you really meant it -- so fast. Now, if they didn't come to the table, we'd make a fortune. We'd take in a lot of money and guess what? Jobs would start going to Alabama and North Carolina and all our places. So when you ask me about the polls, people know -- and I made a lot of money with the Chinese, believe me.

Both in terms of selling them very big apartments -- I sold one for $33 million recently to a Chinese gentleman -- but also in terms of deals. I made a lot of money with the Chinese, and I know the Chinese very well. By the way, they don't love us. I will tell you that. Just in case anybody has any question. They don't. When I see Obama having a dinner at the White House, Rush, for the president of China -- who's been screwing us worse than anybody other than OPEC -- for years, it's not the right and appropriate location for a dinner, believe me. So there are ways of handling it, and they need us, Rush. That's the one thing. They always say, "Oh, but they have our debt." Think of it they take our money and then they loan it back to us and we have to pay 'em interest. It's very... It would be something to solve very easily, if you have the right messenger. We don't have the right messenger. Obama is the wrong messenger.

He really wants to kick China's ass. 

"'[C]ertificate of live birth,' the cat-nippy phrase that gets the birthers howling at the moon...."

Oh? Do cats howl? I howl at the computer screen when I see mixed metaphors.

Speaking of howling, did you hear what they're doing to the wolves?

"Had this been George Bush or almost any other President or Presidential aspirant, they would never have been allowed to attain office, or would have been thrown out of office very quickly."

"For some reason, the press protects President Obama beyond anything or anyone I have ever seen. What they don't realize is that if he was not born in the United States, they would have uncovered the greatest 'scam' in the history of our country. In other words, they would become the hottest writer since Watergate, or beyond."

Donald Trump makes a criticism of the press that is far more important than the "birther" issue itself.

ADDED: The New Yorker has a big profile of Trump:

The patented Trump palaver, a gaseous blather of “fantastic”s and “amazing”s and “terrific”s and “incredible”s and various synonyms for “biggest,” is an indispensable ingredient of the name brand.

Oh, bullshit. Every time I listen to him he's calling everything "yooge."

From the description of his apartment:

“This is the greatest apartment ever built. There’s never been anything like it. There’s no apartment like this anywhere. It was harder to build this apartment than the rest of the building. A lot of it I did just to see if it could be done. All the very wealthy people who think they know great apartments come here and they say, ‘Donald, forget it. This is the greatest.’ ” Very few touches suggested that real people actually lived there—where was it, exactly, that Trump sat around in his boxers, eating roast-beef sandwiches, channel surfing, and scratching where it itched?

"I think this guy should be investigated. He remembers when Obama was born?"

"Give me a break. He's just trying to do something for his party."

Says Donald Trump, referring to  Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie

Chris Matthews on the tsunami: "Was this sort of a good opportunity for the president to remind everybody that he grew up in the United States and Hawaii?"

Incredible!



Rush Limbaugh predicted it.

Birthers aren't like Truthers.

There's a new poll showing that a majority of Republicans doubt that President Obama was born in the United States. Are they paranoid-type thinkers, like the 9/11 Truthers, looking for things to connect up and suspecting that conspiracies lie underneath things that other people think are as they've been presented in the media?

I think we need to see that they are not. They have one issue. One question. They have suspicion about one thing, and that suspicion notably hasn't led them into other theories. There's one factual issue — the immensely important matter of the President's qualification — that hasn't been nailed down to their satisfaction.

It's perfectly rational to take as your working theory that evidence that isn't produced would run counter to the interest of the party who could produce it and does not. In legal cases, if a party fails to produce a document requested in discovery, the judge can deem that the fact is established to be what the party seeking discovery is trying to prove. (See Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 37(b)2)(A)(i)).

All I'm saying is that it's not paranoid to answer the question the way the majority did in that poll. I haven't followed the so-called "birthers" that much. Presumably, some of them branch out into other theories and cross over into conspiracy thinking and paranoia. But it's absurd to read the poll results as a sign that the GOP is full of folks like that. If you really wanted to gauge the nuttiness of Republicans, you could do a much more fine-grained poll about what Republicans believe and how strongly the birther issue correlates to other beliefs.