Judging from last night's performance, Lou Dobbs is pinning his hopes on salvaging the tattered shreds of his credibility on claiming that, gosh, he was just reporting objectively on the "birther" controversy:

Dobbs: A left wing group's liberal mainstream media have stepped up some attacks on me for reporting on the controversy over the president's birth certificate when in fact I've stated many times that President Obama is a citizen of this country in my opinion. The Southern Poverty Law Center, for example, called on CNN to fire me for my even discussing the story. Coming to my defense last night, Bill O'Reilly. ... ... Undocumented persons -- well I want to say first of all to Bill O'Reilly thank you. I do want to point out Bill O'Reilly also kicked my rear end around a bit, disagreeing with me absolutely on the issue of whether or not, as I said, the president could solve all of this by just simply releasing his long form. He and I disagree on that, but I appreciate Bill O'Reilly being a standup guy. And apparently I was a topic on another show on FOX News, Geraldo Rivera attacking me for being wrong on illegal immigration as well as the birth certificate controversy. How I could be wrong about that I don't know because all I said is the president is a citizen, but it would simple to make all this noise go away with just simply producing the long form birth certificate. Ann Coulter came to my defense partially. ... Well I've repeatedly stated that President Obama is a citizen of the United States. My question is simply why not provide the long form birth certificate and end all of the discussion.

If Dobbs thinks this kind of lame excuse is going to pass muster, he needs to think again.

Dobbs wants to have it both ways: He wants to claim he believes Obama is a citizen, but just wants to know why there hasn't been a birth certificate produced. In other words, he believes Obama is a citizen, but believes he might not be.

As Robot regularly replied to Will Robinson: "Does not compute." Especially Dobbs' pretense that he merely intended to shed some light on the story.

First of all, merely covering a story on your network means you think the story has some credibility. Yet every working journalist who has acquainted himself with it has recognized it for what it is -- a groundless conspiracy theory concocted by extremist wingnuts looking for any kind of possible ax to grind with Obama and willing to fabricate stories out of whole cloth.

In other words, it's the kind of story that no responsible journalist will devote any more than a dismissive sentence to reporting. But then, Lou Dobbs is not what you would call a responsible journalist.

But really, one doesn't demonstrate the skepticism or objectivity that Dobbs pretends he was exercising here by claiming "no one" knows "the reality" regarding Obama's birth certificate and remorselessly demanding to know where Obama's birth certificate is -- when in fact everyone's been trying to explain to him that it's in Hawaii (as indeed he finally reported last night).

Verdict: Epic Fail.