Frankly, the president would have been fully justified in responding to the birther controversy like so rather than releasing his original birth certificate:
More thoughts at Greg's place. One of the weirdest things about birtherism to me is that its an expression of racism that tries to shoehorn itself into an acceptable format in a society in which blatant racism is rejected.
Jonathan Bernstein thinks my argument that "this marks a level of personal humiliation no previous president has ever been asked to endure," is overboard, citing the Starr report. That came to mind when I was writing that sentence, but frankly there's a qualitative difference between the humiliation of being forced to live out your sexual infidelities in public and being humiliated because you happen to be a black person with an African name. Bill Clinton's actions played some role in his ultimate humiliation, Obama was simply born black with a "funny name." Every president has faced his own set of nutbars, no president has been forced to implicitly apologize to the entire nation for the immutable circumstances of his birth. This whole birther farce is a black professional nightmare writ large, the idea that there is no level of racial nonsense so petty or stupid that it wouldn't be brought to bear against you by those around you who have every reason to know better.
UPDATE: I fear I may not have expressed myself properly in this post, because I was a little upset with what Bernstein said. The point is that in professional life black people are often subject to random, arbitrary standards on the basis of race, and it's profoundly disheartening to watch this happen to the first black person to become president of the United States, because it implies that there's really no end to it, regardless of one's personal talent or the heights one manages to achieve.
