Inside the Beltway

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By Jennifer Harper INSIDE THE BELTWAY

Certifiable

What with President Obama's 48th birthday coming up Tuesday, the debate continues. Was he born in the U.S. or not?

The folks at World Net Daily remain convinced there's something amiss in Mr. Obama's birth certificate and that he's ultimately not eligible to be in the White House. Factcheck.org offers details: Mr. Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m., in Honolulu County, Hawaii; the serial number on his birth certificate is 010641 and there were birth announcements in the Honolulu Star and the Honolulu Advertiser.

Enough, already, says the National Review.

"Much foolishness has become attached to the question of President Obama's place of birth, and a few misguided souls among the Right have indulged it. The myth that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president represents the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of his election and presidency disappear," the magazine notes in an editorial.

Beware the odd conspiracy theory, lest "the responsible Right become a mirror image of the loopy Left circa 2003."

The editors say that the notion Mr. Obama refused to release a birth certificate is fiction and that there is no mysterious secondary document. And oddly enough PresidentArthur once had to quell rumors he was Canadian.

"One of the unfortunate consequences of this red-herring discussion is that there are plenty of questions about Obama's background and history that we would like to have answered. In spite of two books of memoirs, there remain murky areas in his biography. And when it comes to those college transcripts, count us among those who'd love to know whether Dr. Bailout ever took an advanced economics class and how he performed in it," the National Review says.

"Like Bruce Springsteen, he has a lot of bad political ideas; but he was born in the U.S.A."

By the numbers