The Geeky Asian Guy Blog

In case you just recently arrived on planet Earth, a Birther is someone who believes that President Obama is ineligible to be president of the United States because he is not a “natural born” citizen.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, in an attempt to nip the matter in the bud, then-candidate Obama took the extraordinary step of putting a copy of his birth certificate on the internet as evidence that he was born in Hawaii.  Hawaiian officials (both Republican and Democratic) have certified the authenticity of the document.

But the Birthers claim that this birth certificate is itself evidence that the President is hiding something. They now want to see the President’s “long form” birth certificate.

You’d have to be pretty naive to think that the President’s long form birth certificate would do anything but add fuel to the fire.  (Someone explain that to CNN newsman Lou Dobbs.)  If nothing else,  producing the long form birth certificate would subject any person or institution with the bad luck to be listed on it to a relentless barrage of inane inquiries from Birthers and from the media, who would rather report on Birthers than on health reform.  Just ask the Hawaiian state officials who have spent untold hours answering the same idiotic questions over and over again with respect to the “short form” certificate.

Sorry.  The crazies don’t get to frame the debate.  The crazies don’t get to decide what’s “good enough.”

President Obama has already produced evidence that would be accepted by any court or administrative body in the US as conclusive proof that he was born in Hawaii.  If that’s not good enough for the Birthers, that’s their problem, not the President’s.

Here’s why I am personally offended by Birthers:

In the mid-1990′s, in Santa Monica, California, a legal secretary who worked with me tried to write a check at an auto supply store. She produced a driver’s license as ID.  The clerk decided that she looked “suspicious,” and demanded a second form of ID, which she provided.  He then used a telephone-based security system to confirm that the checking account number was valid, and that there was enough money in the account to cover the check.

But the clerk wasn’t satisfied. He demanded that she recite her checking account number by memory. When she protested that she had already produced two forms of ID, the clerk said: “Hey, if this really is your checking account, you would know the number.”

Oh, by the way, in case you haven’t guessed, she was African American (and one of the nicest people I have ever met).

She wasn’t able to come up with the number, and ended up leaving the store empty-handed and humiliated.  (You know, to me, it would have been more suspicious if she had known the number.)

In other words, the clerk decided in advance that the legal secretary was not who she said she was.  He then proceeded to jerk her around, rejecting perfectly acceptable evidence, until he was finally able to come up with bogus “proof” that he was right.

Sound familiar?  Why on earth would anyone expect the Birthers to conduct themselves less outrageously if provided with the President’s long form birth certificate?  They’ll just keep demanding more and more evidence until they can prove to the world that they were right all along.  I’m thinking that might take a while…

Here’s an awesome interview of Birther attorney Orly Taitz, conducted by the incomparable Stephen Colbert: