Birthers Again

The newly inaugurated Governor of Hawaii says he wants to change the laws keeping Obama's hospital birth records private. He hopes this will put an end to the conspiracy theories about him being born in Kenya, or wherever.

It won't, of course. The birthers are crazy and will reject any evidence given to them. Obama has already shown his birth certificate, and after the initial wave of accusations that it was a fake, they said, "oh well, that a 'certification of live birth' not a birth certificate! We want the real birth certificate has the name of the doctor who delivered him and the hospital where he was born." Now, I don't know what kind of birth certificates these people have, but my birth certificate doesn't list any of those things. I've never seen a birth certificate that does. What these people want are Obama's medical records. They argue that foreign born babies can get birth certificates issued by the state of Hawaii. This is true, but the way that works is if you were born in a hospital in Wellington and your parents brought you home to Hawaii instead of applying for a birth certificate from the government of New Zealand, you could then get a Hawaii birth certificate that says you were born in Wellington, New Zealand, and they would ask for hospital records to confirm even that.

Chris Matthews wants to know why Obama hasn't just asked the state of Hawaii to release those records. Well, the first reason is that it obviously wouldn't convince them so there's no point. The second is that if people believe your birth certificate to be fraudulent and ask to see your private medical records to prove that it isn't, it is, I think, at that point, perfectly reasonable to tell them to fuck off.