Born in the USA

Persistent conspiracy theorists convinced President Barack Obama to post his birth certificate on the Internet in order to prove that he’s really an American. It’s the bizarre high point of a controversy constantly pushed by far-right Republicans.

Hopefully they’re finally satisfied, these so-called birthers, these loony believers in dark conspiracy theories who for years have wanted us to believe that Barack Obama was in the White House illegally. The truth, so they believed, was that America’s first black president was not born in the United States and was therefore constitutionally ineligible to be president.

On Wednesday, the White House posted a copy of Obama’s birth certificate on the Internet. The certificate makes crystal clear that Obama was born on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Hospital in Honolulu on the island of Oahu, and is therefore indisputably a native born citizen of the United States (Hawaii has been a state since 1959).

This is the bizarre culmination of a dispute that began with Obama’s election as president, pushed mainly by right-wing Republicans. During the past few weeks, the furor was given a boost by real estate billionaire Donald Trump, even making it into the legitimate U.S. media when he also expressed doubts about Obama’s place of birth.

Trump’s motivation was without question to generate publicity for himself and his possible run for the presidency. The strategy worked.

For his own part, the president tried to present himself as a man of reason. He appeared Wednesday morning before White House cameras and announced that he had made the decision to release his birth certificate to the public because the dispute over the issue was diverting attention from far more pressing political problems. Obama added, “We do not have time for this kind of silliness.”