Wednesday morning, the homepage of www.nytimes.com heralded the release of President Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate. Speculation about the legitimacy of Obama’s American-born status has existed since his campaigning days, but since then, it has been mustered up by officials as nothing more than calculated gossip.
The birth certificate has now been made public as a response to the rekindled murmurs surrounding the president’s natural-born citizenship, which surfaced once again due to the excessive questioning from real estate king and potential presidential candidate, Donald Trump.
Now, investigation proving the authenticity of the birth certificate has been demanded and Donald Trump is gleaming in his self-proclaimed remarkable achievement of practically extracting the birth certificate out of the president with his own hands.
After reading the headlining articles surrounding this issue, I could only think, “Are you serious?”
The thought that this is the kind of controversy that has been pushed so far and can garner this much media attention and professional investigation, is an appalling and disappointing display of the values some people of this nation hold.
First of all, speaking in a matter of simple opportunity cost, it is a pity that so much time, media and professional attention will be poured into this birth certificate issue for the coming months, when there are real issues such as the national budget, reducing the deficit and possible inflation to focus on.
While some people are rightly critical about the state of America’s political disunity, our involvement in the Middle East and endless other issues that call for White House attention, others are still digging to find skeletons in the president’s closet and demanding that precious resources go into disproving Obama’s citizenship.
No one is belittling the issue of whether it is important that our president is an American-born citizen. It is surely a matter of significance and political integrity, as evidenced by the Constitution, which states that the president must be a natural-born citizen.
But this recent publicizing of Obama’s birth certificate is not a matter of Donald Trump patriotically working to keep the will of the founding fathers alive, nor is it an act of bravery that has achieved a greater good for the people of America who deserve to know “the truth” about the president — it is simply a matter of petty, nihilistic politics.
Yes, President Obama undoubtedly has flaws. He may not be living up to the expectations of some citizens and politicians, his methods of leading this country may frustrate members of certain parties and the general public’s optimism about the government and the future of this nation is falling.
No matter what criticisms and sentiments one has against the president, or what political motives lie behind Trump’s badgering Obama’s birth facts, the fact of the matter is that it is a petulant act to scandalize the trivial issue and demand the attention of highly important and very busy officials.
Not to mention, it is irritating that reputable newspapers are choosing to provide the public with news fit for a tabloid magazine. I can’t help but think of the urgent worldwide current events left hidden, ignored and unpublicized, while politicians get exactly what they want the media to do: broadcast the Mean Girls aspect of politics as some kind of Earth-shattering news.
I can tell you this much — a dissection of the possibility that Obama could be a “secret terrorist” conspiring to bring our nation to its demise is surely not going to get us out of the projected $1.645 trillion federal deficit for next year.
And just for the record, even after all this media coverage, according to a New York Times poll, 60 percent of conservatives don’t think Donald Trump is to be taken seriously as a presidential candidate.