Birth Certificate

By Rich Galen
Friday, April 29, 2011

Dear Mr. Mullings:

Why aren't you writing this from London? Don't tell us you weren't invited to the Royal Wedding!

Signed,

The Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Granddaughters of the American Revolution

Of course I was invited. Are you kidding me? Unfortunately I forgot to put it into my Outlook calendar and by the time I remembered, all the coach-class middle seats were gone on Virgin Airways and I didn't want to spend the money on a full Y fare.

Anyway, I wanted to be here today for the really big events - rounds two and three of the NFL draft; and the further adventures of Donald Trump.

Speaking of whom, I have given a great deal of thought to the whole birth certificate thing. Like you, I wondered why, if it had been available all this time, Obama didn't just ask for it two years ago and put this nonsense to bed.

I know, I know, someone will do a microscopic, nano-technology examination and determine that the paper that the certificate is printed on will not even have been invented until 2017 so it must be a phony.

Here are two data points:

1. Do you think that if the Clintons had thought there was even a ghost of a chance that Obama had been born in Kenya or on Mars they wouldn't have hired guys to break into the Hawaiian Keeper of Documents Offices to see if they could find this thing prior to the Democratic convention?

2. The Governor of Hawaii, at the time of the election, was a wonderful woman named Linda Lingle; a Republican. Don't you think the Governor of the whole state might have inquired as to the existence of a birth certificate for the Democratic nominee for President?

Obama went to the briefing room to release the document and said he had more important things to do than to answer questions about where he was born. He was right. Immediately after that he got on Air Force One and flew to Chicago to be on the Oprah Winfrey show.

Now that Obama has finally released his birth certificate, the left-wing, biased, unfair, always-after-the-Republican news media is hounding Trump to make good on his promise to make public his tax returns if Obama came clean on his birth certificate.

Yeah. Right.

I don't care about his tax returns. I'm pretty sure Trump makes more than I do. And more than you do. And maybe more than all of us put together.

What would be of much greater interest to most of us would be if Trump were to make public the divorce agreements for his first two marriages.

I'm not for President Obama moving CIA Director Leon Panetta to Secretary of Defense and General David Petraeus to be the head of the CIA.

Two things. Again:

1. I don't think the rest of the world will think having the CIA and DoD joined at the hip like this is such a good idea. It signals a CIA taking on more and more of a military role (which is not new to Obama) while it smacks of the USSR during the heyday of the GRU and the KGB.

2. Second, Obama had about 310 million Americans to choose from. I am more than a little concerned that Obama's circle of trust is so constricted that he has to keep reassigning the same people to new jobs in his Administration.

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood to State. Hillary Clinton to VP. Biden to … the Amtrak station in Wilmington as Secretary of Transportation.

Something else to give President Obama pause might be the first quarter Gross Domestic Product numbers. According to the Commerce Department, the GDP grew at an anemic 1.8 percent in the first three months of 2011 after having grown by 3.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2010.

At the same time, Bloomberg.com had the story of the Department of Labor reporting that "New applications for jobless benefits unexpectedly rose last week to the highest level in three months. Unemployment insurance claims jumped by 25,000 to 429,000."

Sputtering economic growth. Higher unemployment.

A thousand birth certificates won't fix those problems.

Obama might get a show on the Oprah Winfrey Network come January 2013.