feed a cold, starve a delusion

God knows this Birther paranoia doesn't need any more oxygen. But in a Chris Matthews-like attempt to expose this farce as unfit for civilized discussion, let's dispose of a couple of "arguments."

One thing that has bugged me from the first inklings of this wretched nonsense is the futility of wrangling over whether Obama was born in Hawaii (yes, which is part of the United States of America) or in another country such as Kenya.

So what? I thought. His mother's an American citizen, doesn't matter where exactly he was born, he's a citizen too.

Then i gather that one has to go through a naturalization process to be "official" if you were born elsewhere. Probably necessary to obtain a social security number and a passport. That lends support to the Birther claim that engineering a birth announcement in the Hawaii paper was a hoax of convenience: you'd avoid a bit of bureaucratic hassle if BHO was born in Hawaii rather than another country.

But forging a certificate of live birth (which IS a BIRTH CERTIFICATE) is well, a Nixon level of hoax-perpetrating and cover-up.

One other shred of evidence to cling desperately to: Catatonic Gordon Liddy on Hardball persisted in a fantasy about a "sworn deposition" by O's step-grandmother. Sorry, G, totally wishful thinking. (Debunked here.) Poor woman doesn't speak English, in a phone conversation through a translator she appeared to think she was being asked, "Where were *you* when O was born?" Well, right there where she was in Kenya. But "the boy" was born in Hawaii.

I'm getting the feeling that certain segments of the population really can't deal with black people living in big houses. esp big white ones.