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Anyone who’s ever been faced with a really big project and instead fritters away hours on some other diversion can surely understand what the resurgent annoyance with the presidential birth certificate means.
It means that concentrating on a difficult task is hard, a chore whose gratification is pushed far into the future, if it arrives at all.
It’s far easier to ruminate over the tantalizing prospect that President Barack Obama has made fraudulent claims on the natural-born citizenship he needs to hold his job.
Meanwhile, grappling with actual worries — the country’s persistent unemployment, looming debt crisis, multiple wars, malaise over rising prices for gasoline and other essentials — can be forgotten, at least for short periods.
Now the last argument for skepticism about Obama’s birthplace, and for procrastination on America’s real governance issues, has been stripped away.
Finally, and mercifully.
Long before yesterday’s White House move to release the long-form birth certificate, most Hawaii residents had rightly accepted the proof offered during the campaign: the certified short form based on a computerized data base that had been churning out copies for the past decade. That, and not the long form, is this state’s official state document to prove citizenship for acquiring a passport and many other purposes.
But this wasn’t good enough for many people. Since Obama’s nomination and election, the rumblings over the long form have persisted in the blogosphere, occasionally bubbling to the surface. It was the recent persistent provocation by megalomaniacal real-estate magnate Donald Trump, who’s now flirting with a run for the GOP presidential nomination, that turned up the volume of that rumble to a roar.
Likely motivated by political concerns that more than just the lunatic fringe was paying attention, Obama finally yielded. The long form is not routinely released, even to the person named on the record, but the state Department of Health departed from usual practice.
Thank goodness. Now, can people return the favor and quit pestering the registrar’s overburdened staff on this? Far too much time has been wasted on what is, it should be clear by now, a baseless distraction on the periphery.
So, too, is the persistent braying to release Obama’s college records. None of that is pertinent to answering the truly essential question: How well or poorly has he been navigating through the treacherous domestic and foreign-policy waters?
Reasonable people can disagree on the answer to that, but nobody can make a convincing case that this president is somehow intellectually deficient. He can be slammed for being too professorial, if anything.
Perhaps the most galling thing about all this is what it says about how the rest of
America sometimes views its 50th state. The doubts that some people undeniably harbored about Obama’s foreign-sounding name, his non-citizen father, his mixed-racial background, were intensified by the fact that it all happened out here in the exotic Pacific. The assurances by Hawaii state officials, including two governors and two health directors, should have been accepted as serious. What Hawaii received instead was continual insults.
The harassment from the extremes undoubtedly will continue. But the president’s decision to endure the indignity of having to show the long-form proof to appease a growing number of skeptics is a welcome gesture if it spikes the distraction. Now the media, Hawaii and the entire nation must concentrate on the real issues.
As for The Donald: This means you, too.
