Three reasons why President Obama finally released his birth certificate

Why did President Obama release his long-form birth certificate now? After all, conspiracy theorists who believe him to be foreign-born have been calling on him to produce the document for years.

Mr. Obama himself said it was so the nation could move on from this “silliness” to more important issues. But some administration critics believe the opposite: that the timing of Wednesday’s announcement is meant to distract the nation from items of greater national importance.

Thus ex-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin tweeted on Wednesday that her followers shouldn’t let the birth certificate hoopla distract them from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke’s afternoon press conference – the first ever by a head of the US central bank.

“Stay focused, eh?” Ms. Palin wrote.

Talk show host Glenn Beck said the same thing on his syndicated radio show.

Both Palin and Mr. Beck in the past have complained that the Fed has yet to answer for all it did during the depths of the recent fiscal crisis. Palin in particular has complained that Mr. Bernanke and other Fed leaders are standing by and doing nothing while inflation gathers steam.

Liberals, of course, believe just the opposite – that Bernanke is a heartless banker more concerned with holding down prices via tight money than easing unemployment. Go figure.

Anyway, the beauty of criticizing the timing of Obama’s birth-certificate announcement is that it allows you to be tough on the administration without having to align yourself with the so-called “birthers,” who discount evidence that the president was born in Hawaii. Which is part of the US.

Thus Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, who has said that developer/reality show star Donald Trump is wrong on the “birther” issue, hit the administration for trying to prove his (Priesbus’s) own point.

“The president ought to spend his time getting serious about repairing the economy,” Mr. Priebus said Wednesday. “Unfortunately his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our No. 1 priority – our economy.”

1 | 2

Next