“Birtherism,” RIP

Today, President Obama finally released his “long-form,” or official, birth certificate. There has never been any doubt about the fact that Obama was born in Honolulu. The local newspapers reported it; case closed. Therefore, he is a natural-born American citizen and is eligible for the presidency.
The mystery has always been, why was Obama so reluctant to release his long-form birth certificate? There have been two possible explanations: 1) the birth certificate contains some embarrassing information that Obama would prefer not to make public; or 2) he thought the “birther” controversy was hurting Republicans, and therefore wanted to keep it going.
Here is the birth certificate, as posted on the White House web site; click to enlarge:
birth-certificate-long-form.jpg
I don’t see anything embarrassing about it. That suggests that Obama was keeping it out of sight on the theory that it was a distraction to Republicans that made some of them look bad with independents. That hypothesis is consistent with the timing of the release of the birth certificate: polls in recent weeks have shown that the “issue” was apparently hurting Obama, as astonishingly large numbers of Americans told pollsters that they doubted whether Obama was born in the U.S. So he decided to call the game off. That’s how it looks to me, anyway.
Now we can get back to serious issues, like the federal debt and the price of gasoline.

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