Former Glenn Beck Show guest Jonah Goldberg



I haven’t studied the just released PDF of Obama’s birth certificate. But assuming there’s nothing in there about a birthmark that resembles the numbers “666” or about how his father worked for the KGB and — of course — assuming that the font in question matches typewriters of the time (Let’s get Dan Rather on that): I figure this puts the birther thing to bed once and for all. Good. But it does raise the perplexing question: If this was possible all along, why did the WH take such sweet time releasing it? Could it be that this White House, continuing a tactic used by Democrats for years, actually liked being able to cast their opponents — often through guilt by association — as paranoid nuts? No, that couldn’t possibly be it.

Obviously, Goldberg's suggestion that there was a grand conspiracy to sucker right-wingers into becoming paranoid nuts is laughable on it's face. At least he acknowledges there are paranoid nuts on the right, but saying Democrats are to blame for their creation? Whatever happened to the conservative mantra about how people are responsible for their own decisions?

As silly as his idea is, Goldberg is not alone: Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich have made the same claim.

It's worth pointing out that the fundamental assumption of this theory is that before today, it was reasonable to have doubts about President Obama's place of birth.

Goldberg, for example, expressed his hope that the long-form birth certificate would finally put "the birther thing" to bed "once and for all." But while implicit in Goldberg's statement is the notion that even this might not be enough, the truth is the question of Obama's birthplace has already been put to bed "once and for all," and nothing we learned today changes that. The long-form birth certificate doesn't prove anything that hasn't already been proven, because the case was already bullet proof.

So while Goldberg (and Rove and Gingrich) think Obama didn't release it before in order to lure Republicans into lunacy, the fact is that with or without today's release there was no basis upon which to believe those birther conspiracy theories.

Put another way, it's no less reasonable to be a birther today than it was yesterday. Nothing fundamental has changed. Note that I'm not saying it's reasonable to be a birther. It's not. It's crazy beyond belief.

But according to these so-called conservative leaders, it was reasonable, and somehow it was Obama's fault. That's simply insane. It's no wonder that lunatics dominate so much of the Republican Party. For the good of the country, they really need to get their act together. America has got real problems. It's time for them to start addressing them. Unfortunately, there's little reason to believe that they will.