OPINION: Obama does his best to answer 'birther' critics

[link to www.lehighvalleylive.com]
Wouldn’t it be great if every constitutional crisis in the United States could be resolved by the president calling a news conference, holding up a 50-year-old document and saying, “See?”
Yet the “birther” controversy was never about upholding the Constitution against someone who was secretly thwarting it.
To believe that, you have to inhale the hook, line and sinker about Barack Obama’s parents shuttling off to Africa just before he was born on Aug. 4, 1961, having the kid, and jet-setting back to Honolulu in time to fool the people in the hospital, the state vital statistics department and the newspapers.
Yet, Obama put aside the important changes in his Cabinet for a while this week to devote a news conference to the lingering issue of his birth, producing the “long form” of his birth certificate to buttress the “live birth” document that merely theorized, to some, that he was born in Hawaii.
So … where’s the video?
If that alleged “live birth” isn’t available with a few keystrokes on YouTube, can it be said to exist at all?
Don’t give up now, birthers. There has to be more kindling out there to keep the conspiracy fires burning — to make sure Obama’s nativity remains up there with the JFK assassination, the Bush administration masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, and the folks who know they were probed by extraterrestrials.
And what of Donald Trump, who deftly orchestrated a bump in the Republican presidential polls by lending credence to the birther movement? Just a few weeks ago he claimed to have investigators in Hawaii, uncovering evidence that would stun the world. He publicly raised doubts about the existence of the long form.
Run, Donald, run.
Who better to complete the makeover of the American presidential election process into a reality show or a celebrity golf outing?
It would all be funny if these theatrics didn’t authenticate the American obsession with the superficial, the slippage of brainpower in what once was a Grand Old Party, and diversion from issues that need our attention — runaway federal debt, war, unemployment, health care, gas prices, inflation waiting to happen.
The fact that doubts about Obama’s birth persisted this long is a reflection of news organizations caving to the incendiary issue of the moment — not to mention an undercurrent of racism that prodded a black president, more than halfway through his term, to cough up a document to prove (again) that he is a legitimate American citizen.
Now there’s a conspiracy theory that deserves some unearthing — that the genesis of the birther movement is rancor at the idea that a white man no longer occupies the White House.
Anyone want to take a crack at disproving that myth?