Birther time: What is Obama hiding?

And he used to have a
consulting business in Indonesia...
Tom Waits, "What's He Building in There?," 1999.

Those lyrics come from a Waits spoken word piece, about a man's suspicious neighbor who appears to be hiding something.

I believe this is my first post on the the Barack Obama birth certificate controversy. I first started hearing rumors last summer that Obama was not born in Hawaii as he claimed, but in fact born in Kenya, which some people claim would not make him constitutionally eligible to serve as president. The Supreme Court has never defined the term "natural born citizen." I bounced rumor off of the ears of a few Republican operatives, and they responded that there likely is no "there" there, and the Obama campaign apparatus was keeping that question open as a canard for Republicans to grind their teeth on, rather than question his positions, his record, and his very thin resume.

A year later the "birthers" are still asking, "Where is the birth certificate?" The Obama-ites have released a certificate of live birth, which is not the same thing, that document is not contemporaneous. It was not printed in 1961, which is when the president was born.

I believe that Obama was born in Hawaii, but Andrew McCarthy raises some good points in today's National Review.

Who cares that Hawaii’s full state records would doubtless confirm what we already know about Obama’s birthplace? They would also reveal interesting facts about Obama’s life: the delivering doctor, how his parents described themselves, which of them provided the pertinent information, etc. Wasn’t the press once in the business of interesting — and even not-so-interesting — news?

And why would Obama not welcome Hawaii’s release of any record in its possession about the facts and circumstances of his birth? Isn’t that kind of weird? It would, after all, make the whole issue go away and, if there’s nothing there, make those who’ve obsessed over it look like fools. Why should I need any better reason to be curious than Obama’s odd resistance to so obvious a resolution?

There’s speculation out there from the former CIA officer Larry Johnson — who is no right-winger and is convinced the president was born in Hawaii — that the full state records would probably show Obama was adopted by the Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro and became formally known as “Barry Soetoro.” Obama may have wanted that suppressed for a host of reasons: issues about his citizenship, questions about his name (it’s been claimed that Obama represented in his application to the Illinois bar that he had never been known by any name other than Barack Obama), and the undermining of his (false) claim of remoteness from Islam. Is that true? I don’t know and neither do you.

But we should know. The point has little to do with whether Obama was born in Hawaii. I'm quite confident that he was. The issue is: What is the true personal history of the man who has been sold to us based on nothing but his personal history? On that issue, Obama has demonstrated himself to be an unreliable source and, sadly, we can’t trust the media to get to the bottom of it. What’s wrong with saying, to a president who promised unprecedented “transparency”: Give us all the raw data and we’ll figure it out for ourselves?

Okay, Barry, cough it up. Let's see your birth certificate.

More from "What's He Building in There:"

He's hiding something from
The rest of us...

UPDATE July 31: Dr. William A. Jacobson, a Cornell law professor, says the Dems are partly responsible for birther mania.

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