President Obama loves to broad-brush his opposition as a bunch of mean-spirited ideologues who are so divorced from reality that they won’t be swayed by indisputable facts. Nothing has helped him more in painting this picture of his critics than the unfortunate proliferation of self-taught experts in 1960s Hawaiian vital records. Beginning in June 2008, when Obama released his short-form birth certificate in order to quell spurious rumors about his “real” middle name, the people we have come to know as birthers decided they knew better than their own eyes.
Perhaps emboldened by the blogosphere’s successful debunking in 2004 of Dan Rather’s fake documents questioning President George W. Bush’s National Guard service, the birthers sought to re-create this achievement, except this time the facts were not on their side. Obama’s short-form birth certificate — the one released in 2008 — was and is valid for all legal purposes under Hawaiian law. It proved Obama’s birthplace and citizenship as well as any other American’s birth certificate. But over a three-year period, birthers cast doubt in some quarters about the legitimacy of Obama’s citizenship, ignoring that the burden of proof was and always has been on them, not on the president. They brought forth no proof to dispute Obama, but they did bring multiple frivolous lawsuits. Even a few members of our armed forces bought into the birther con game and refused to obey orders from their commander in chief. Some publications irresponsibly championed their cause.
