Fringe members from every right-wing sideshow in the country, Donald Trump acting is their pompous ring master, have been demanding President Obama’s birth certificate. Unhappy with the online “certificate of live birth”, these peripheral partisans accused it of being “doctored” or an outright forgery. Today, after nearly six months of a very publicly renewed debate over his origin of birth, the Obama administration released his long-form government-issued birth certificate.

Barack Hussein Obama II was born at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital at 7:24 p.m. on August 4^th, 1961. Period.

I, for one, respected the president’s resolve not to give in to such ludicrous demands, and was disappointed when I found out he had. Never before has a sitting president been so hounded to prove something as simple as his place of birth. As vehemently as his detractors deny it, I sincerely believe that there are unstated, even subconscious, prejudices at work in their inability to accept his natural citizenship. He is a black man, with a Muslim sounding name (in a period in our history when “Muslim” is a bad word), and born in Hawaii, which culturally seems to be considered more of an exotic vacation spot than a legitimate member of the union.

Mark my words, the President’s release of his birth certificate will change nothing. It will only encourage the detractors to complain even louder, and heighten this nonexistent debate in our debased media. You could produce a video recording of his birth and they would cry foul. You could hand these people a time-machine, they could travel back to 1961, witness his birth, and they would declare the entire event a set-up. The reason is that these people are not motivated by logic, they are motivated by their own petty agendas.

Donald Trump, on April 7^th, was on Morning Joe on MSNBC, and was even told to “drop the whole birther thing”. The former governor of Pennsylvania stated that he had a lot of credibility on finance and economics, but it was all being overshadowed by his irrational obsession with Obama’s birth certificate. Trump, as with every other piece of criticism he’s received, shrugged it off.

There’s clearly a national apathy, if not outright disgust, with the birther debate. The fact that President Obama acknowledged their complaints by releasing his full birth certificate only serves to justify their suspicions. At the very least it will prolong this small but vocal fixation. They could have simply allowed the birthers to make themselves known, allow it to become a divisive, if not comical, issue among the Republican field, and scored political points by allowing the GOP fight it out.

In fact, White House Communications Director David Pfeiffer acknowledged that it was in Obama’s, “long-term political interests to allow the birther debate to dominate the Republican Party for months to come.”

So why’d he do it?

Obama noted his own disgust (in his trademark understated way) with the so-called “debate”, and noted that during the budget crisis, “the dominant news story wasn’t about these huge, monumental choices that we were going to have to make.” Essentially, our President released his certificate so that the dialogue would end, which I feel is a somewhat optimistic approach. (See above.) If he really wants to end the birther debate, he needs to allow it to die (which will probably be a slow, entertaining death).

Photo from nydailynews.com