Andrew McCarthy offers an interesting pseudo-defense of the birthers. He starts by noting, as NRO’s editorial staff rightly did before, that Barack Hussein Obama was almost certainly born in Honolulu, HI on August 4, 1961, and that producing a long-form birth certificate is extremely unlikely to show otherwise. He then proceeds to go a bit off the rails first by echoing birther hair-splitting over “certificates” vs. “certifications” (hint: both have the same root word certify, and for the same reason), and then by conflating the concept of a “vault copy” (the original, long-form birth certificate, which likely no longer exists) with the state records derived from it and used to generate, among other things, the COLB.

Returning to earth, McCarthy lists a number of aspects of Obama’s life on which President Transparency has been … well … less than transparent. He largely ignores the fact, however, that scarcely any of them would be clarified by producing the original long-form birth certificate, if it still exists, or all of the records surrounding his birth which are in the State of Hawaii’s possession, if it does not. Yeah, it sucks that Obama got away with claiming his first job out of college was as a junior copy-editor with a small company that employed several blacks rather than as a financial writer for a multinational corporation that hired no blacks other than him. And it’s lame that he got away with telling some people he met his wife at school rather than work, and lamer still to lead some to believe he’d grown up on food stamps rather than being raised in comfort by his well-to-do grandparents. But who in his right mind thinks the “vault copy” of his birth certificate from 1961 would tell us anything about what Obama would or would not do later in life? The closest McCarthy comes to identifying a key issue on which the vault copy might bear is Obama’s possible past Indonesian citizenship and the even more important question of whether his surname was ever Soetoro. Even if we do care about these petty issues (dual citizenship may not be petty, but hair-splitting over dual vs. three-way citizenship is), one really has to wonder what would possess the normally sensible McCarthy to quote Larry Johnson, of all people, in support of the theory that the vault copy would resolve these issues, anyway.

McCarthy’s Balkoesque defense of the birthers is perhaps best summed up by this paragraph:

While it is all well and good to belittle the birth-certificate controversy, without it we’d know only what the media and Obama himself would tell us about his multiple citizenships, which is nothing.

Right, ‘cuz before a band of kooks ran amuck claiming Obama wasn’t a citizen, no one challenged him on his lack of transparency or his self-serving and often inconsistent accounts of his past. Even if it were true that birther insanity was the catalyst for some new level of scrutiny that appears to have come only in McCarthy’s imagination, do we really want to hang our collective hat on the theory that it’s OK to run around making allegations McCarthy himself acknowledges as crazy, just because all this crazy talk on Topic A might lead someone say something non-crazy about Topic B? Really?

Me, I’m a lot more concerned about an environment where no one can challenge Obama on any of the many legitimate bases there are for criticizing him, without being branded as a birther kook. We saw this before in the 1990s, where anyone who attacked Clinton for anything other than being too moderate got lumped together with the nuts who were convinced he’d murdered Vince Foster with his bare hands. I did not like that enviornment then. I do not care to see it replicated now. Rather than trying to rehabiliate these nuts, our message to them should be a clear and unambiguous “thanks for nothing.” Even that is on the generous side, as they have actually contributed something of value to the debate. The problem is that that value is negative.