So, Obama has finally released the "Certificate of Live Birth," that is a copy of the original form that was filed with the Department of Health when he was born in 1961. A birther might ask why he took so long. A few reasons perhaps. One reason might be that, as I've heard, Hawaii like most states has no form that you can fill out which requests this. To do so would require either a court case or an executive order. Both sound pretty expensive, especially when you couldn't phone that in, you'd have to send somebody to Hawaii to do it, which is what Obama did, at his own expense.
A second and more compelling reason: a matter of pride. Why should he have to? A lighter complected candidate and with two white parents had never been asked to, including those born in border territories, like John McCann, who had been born in the Panama Canal Zone. For all others, the usual, run-of-the-mill birth certificate a department of health issues is good enough. In fact, we have rarely asked for even that with any presidential candidate. The doubt seemed to be based on racism. Not that Birthers were going to discriminate against some ethnic group in the workplace or in public, but allowing a black man as Commander and Chief and premier role model of the country? "Wasn't letting them out of the back of the bus enough?"
It looks like an especially lunatic form of racism when they begin to question his birth announcement and make it into a fifty-year conspiracy or say he (practically saying "this mongrel") stole somebody's identity.
Or it would be, except this is standard behavior from conspiracy theorists of all stripes. A single, overwhelmingly obvious fact that makes their theory untenable is discounted, and they continue to nurse the theory as though it's happening in an alternate universe. By then, they're not conspiracy theorists but conspiracy cultists, or as I would also call them, "the faithful" or "the believers."
Conspiracies don't happen, but those we're trained to look for by pop culture generally don't. The all powerful conspiracy that could wipe out evidence at will is usually incorrect. People generally try to find order in random events, like a single gunman killing Kennedy in front of the whole nation. (If they had that good a conspiracy, why not set Air Force 1 to crash? Or hire a female assassin to kill him in bed? He did sleep with a Soviet spy.) People try to think that it normally can't happen unless there's something abnormal going on, but we live in a chaotic world.
I'm digressing too far. Usually, when we mis-perceive we do so making an error in probabilities. Such with this Birther conspiracy. You would expect that if there's a fifty-year conspiracy to put Obama in the White House that there would be a birth announcement placed in the paper, that he would have a origins stupid white people find odd, and that he would be reluctant to release all his birth information, but the arrow of inference does not go the other way. If all those facts are true, that doesn't mean that there's a conspiracy. That's a probability and logic error that people make all the time these days.
Either way, I will watch with interest what happens to the Birther movement now, that is, how many fall away and how many expand the Birther theories further into political fantasizing. I wish I could write a novel using the Birther conspiracies as a model, but nobody would buy it because it's an implausible fantasy people could believe for free.
Further comment: I don't want to give the impression that it's only the crazies who subscribe to conspiracy theories. No, subscribing to conspiracy theories is part of normal behavior and we're all susceptible to it. A good defense against falling into it is to remind yourself which way the arrow of inference should be pointing (if you haven't logic, Google "inference.") Very seldom does it point both directions.
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