Read It And Weep, Birthers!

I suppose everyone has heard by now that President Obama has released his long-form birth certificate. Of course, this will not dissuade too many actual birthers from their beliefs, but my guess is that it will remove the one major avenue of dogwhistling this particular issue. No more will people be able to say, “Well, why doesn’t he just release his birth certificate?” Sure, the birthers will move onto something else, no doubt, some other reason why it’s not good enough, but people who want to maintain any sort of status in Washington won’t be able to toss off this bullshit anymore without descending into Crazyland. My belief is that most Republicans do actually value internal Washington status, regardless of what they say, so there should be more of a reluctance to indulge this stuff from here on out. How much more? I can’t say.

Really, when you think about it, you can’t fault the timing from a political perspective. I maintain that Obama had already produced everything he needed to produce, but at a moment where birtherism is now the de facto Republican belief, he’s managed to sweep away practically the only fig leaf of validity from this whole silly enterprise at just the moment when it’s become the subject of (intra-Republican) debate. It’s easy to portray this as sticking the knife to Donald Trump, but honestly it could function as a lifeline to Republicans in order to push back on the conspiracy theories, were they so inclined. I wouldn’t bet on more than token effort on that front, though. Republicans just don’t push back against the base, except for when you see pluralities of Republicans favoring the minimum wage or higher taxes on the rich or what have you.