A curious lack of curiosity

Here's an absolutely superb article by Diana West in Trentonian that express eloquently what many of us have been clearly on our minds:

Why won’t President Obama give the nation that elected him a verifying look at the original “long-form” version of his birth certificate?

It’s important to grasp the weird fact that this simple request — requiring nothing more than a nod of the presidential head — ranks as fightin’ words to American journalists.

But why not insist on access to the one piece of evidence that could lay the “natural born” citizen issue to rest once and for all?

The media have made their aversion to proof perversely clear: Whatever Obama does, their jarringly unified message is that he certainly should not direct the state of Hawaii to make public his original, long-form birth certificate.

A presidential directive would instantly dispense with the divisive question of whether President Obama’s still-secret, long-form birth certificate contains compromising information.

The entire controversy would disappear forever if there were nothing more sensational on that document than the name of the Hawaiian hospital where baby Barack came into the world.

Such mundane info is the kind of thing that’s missing from the Internet images of the short-form Certification of Live Birth that the Obama campaign made available in 2008 online.

This ironically is the Web-projected imagery that the mainstream media have unquestioningly relied on, even as they have imperiously dismissed all questions regarding its veracity and provenance as “Internet-fueled rumor.”

To be sure, there is corroborating evidence available. Contemporaneous announcements of baby Barack’s arrival in local Hawaiian papers are usually cited as the clincher. But none of it is definitive.

Why won’t the president just give us a look at the original birth certificate and be done with it?

This is the mystery behind the unease “out there,” unease the mainstream media are now simultaneously picking up on even as they try to squelch it.

And this is true particularly after CNN’s Lou Dobbs raised the issue. Dobbs trusts that Obama is in fact a natural-born citizen, he says. But he adds he would like the president to verify his status regardless.

And why not? The Constitution does insist, after all, that a United States president must be a natural-born citizen of the country.

So why won’t this president — who promised the American people an unprecedented level of transparency — reveal his original long-form birth certificate?

Unheeded, the “natural born” controversy will roil indefinitely, further stirred by Hawaiian law (Section 338-17.8, titled “Certificates for children born out of State”), which makes state birth documentation available to children born out of state, even born out of the country.

None of this is healthy. Not the president’s suspicious secrecy. Not the media’s protective absence of curiosity.

It almost makes it seem as if someone might have something to hide.

The title of the article, "A curious lack of curiosity", is super also. So the question American people deserve an answer in 2009 is really what is that something Obama has to hide?