By Kevin Foley
We thought it was dead and buried but the birther zombie lives on thanks to Donald Trump.
The billionaire claims he's deployed investigators to Hawaii to find out what the president is hiding. If Trump's investigators in fact exist, here's what they'll discover:
Barak Hussein Obama was born at the Kapi'olani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961. Both the Honolulu Advertiser and the Honolulu Star Bulletin carried announcements of Obama's birth. In addition, there is a notarized copy of the president's state-issued certificate of live birth on-line.
Despite this irrefutable evidence, here comes The Donald with the pronouncement on "The View" and other programs that Obama was not born in America and thus he should not be serving as president.
Trump is a lot of things, but insane isn't one of them. That's a category reserved for tin foil hat wearers like Orly Taitz, a nutty Russian émigré whose antics used to be a regular feature on Fox News until she jumped the shark and released a forged Kenyan "birth certificate" with Obama's name on it.
No, Trump is all about the Trump Brand. And as one correspondent noted on these pages, the Trump Brand is "yooge," so the Trump Brand must be front and center and top of mind 24-7. On this point, Garry Trudeau has lately been having a field day at Trump's expense in his Doonesbury comic strip.
Of course, Trump has no realistic chance of becoming president. For starters, the media has yet to resurrect The Donald's checkered past for the benefit of voters who may have forgotten how the brand became The Brand: The junk bonds, the brushes with bankruptcy, the late debt payments, the misleading SEC financial statements, the burned investors, the third wife, and the double comb-over, to name just a few skeletons looming in Trump's closet.
He will never let things get that far, of course, because Trump is adept at playing the media game. He'll bail long before the dirty dishing begins. Meantime, when you can't do something outrageous, like getting elected to the Gaming Hall of Fame, then say something outrageous, like the president isn't American.
For more than 40 years, the bombastic Donald Trump has suckered the media into believing he's a national figure of towering importance and not just a glorified landlord with an astonishing hairdo. Long after others have had their 15 minutes, The Donald is in perpetual vogue, a testament to his PR acumen and/or the media's gullibility.
That was fine as long as we were talking about gambling casinos or Wrestlemania. Unfortunately, America today faces monumental social, economic and military problems that some self-serving carnival barker won't be able to fix, and Trump knows that too.
Despite the enormity and complexity of the job, despite the life and death struggles of our troops in harm's way, despite the stakes for America, The Donald has reduced the American presidency to something fatuous and trivial.
In going birther, Trump reveals his utter contempt for our country and the intelligence of its people. The Donald is once again giving us all the middle finger while grabbing a few cheesy headlines and talk show appearances for the Trump Brand.
As the 2012 presidential race heats up we can only hope that the media will start doing its real job and tell Trump, maybe once and for all, "You're fired."
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Kevin
Foley is president of KEF
Media Associates, an Atlanta-based producer and distributor
of sponsored news content to television and radio media. |