I have very little to say about President Obama’s decision to release his long-form birth certificate, but I will offer this: No white president would have been pressured into this. And my gut tells me Obama shouldn’t have done it, as it makes him look like he’s been bullied by sociopaths.
Although I don’t hold out much hope, I do think this is a splendid occasion for executives at mainstream news organizations to think about the consequences of “covering the controversy” as opposed to calling out people like Donald Trump as the lying jackasses that they are.
Yes, there’s been some of that. But not nearly enough.
Media Nation 
@Rob Goodwin: The Globe letter writer was incredibly short-sighted and naive. The problem with Obama responding to the birthers is that it opens the door to every other Crazy L.K. with a screw loose and an agenda. It’s like a publicly traded company responding to every rumor in the market: If they pick and choose which to respond to, they run the risk of looking like they are hiding something when they don’t respond. So public companies (rightly) don’t respond at all, except to say they won’t respond. Same thing here.
Hi Dan,
A retraction? I don’t think so. For some reason you have avoided my argument like the plague, and I stand by everything I wrote. You can make this an argument about weather you used the term ‘all’ or not, but I’m not interested. The first time you qualified the racist charge was May 6th at 2:22 pm. And for the record, I didnt accuse you of claiming ‘all’ birthers were racist. My statement was “You have stated many times without qualification, until now, that the birthers are racists”. I’m sorry we weren’t able to engage in my argument, but at least it wasn’t for lack of trying. Thanks.
@Rob: It’s because I know what I think and I know what I’ve said. I take great pains to distinguish racial insensitivity from racism. So when I see someone write that I’ve said “the” birthers are racist, I have no interest in engaging, because it strikes me as such a willful misreading of what I wrote. Here is a small but characteristic example. On the other hand, I don’t think there’s any question that the birthers play on racial fears. Here are some new findings that you will definitely want to chew over.
You and the blind squirrel still in a staring match, Mikie?