LA Times Columnist Still Accusing Obama of “Stonewalling” His Birther “Critics”

Oh brother. Laura Bush's former flak, Andrew Malcolm, continues to embarrass the once-mighty Los Angeles Times with his endless stream of Obama insults and robotic regurgitation of right-wing talking points.

For instance, in the wake of the Osama bin Laden killing, Malcolm is still furious with…Obama! [Emphasis added]

However, although global audiences have been treated to countless photos of atrocities and gruesome scenes in recent years -- severed heads online, bound Abu Ghraib prisoners, Saddam Hussein hanged and burned, mutilated American bodies hanging from a Falluja bridge come vividly to mind -- Obama clearly was more concerned about possible foreign reaction than domestic disbelief, which he doesn't place much stock in

A strange reaction from someone who tried for four years stonewalling skeptics of something as simple as documenting his birthplace, only to finally give in and release his sealed long-form certificate just this spring -- and then see virtually all the wind immediately disappear from the sails of the so-called birther movement.

Operating in a longtime one-party city like Chicago, Democratic politicians do not often feel beholden to explaining themselves to the obedient public. So, the lesson this president from there obviously drew from his unnecessary birth certificate-sealing confrontation was to do it again with the Bin Laden photos.

It's hard not to laugh along as you read. It's also hard to miss Malcolm's utter contempt for the president. But that's true of all far-right pundits who suffer from Obama Derangement Syndrome, and Malcolm's case has always been quite acute.

But still, claiming the president spent years “stonewalling skeptics” about his birth certificate? What a whopper. A) Obama didn't stonewall anyone. Obama released the same paperwork that every other Hawaii citizen presents (certificate of live birth), which was why the state of Hawaii has vouched for Obama's birth documentation for years.

And B), the critics who were hounding Obama to release his long-form birth certificate don't qualify as “skeptics.” They qualify as complete nut jobs. No sane person who has been paying attention for the last three years could think Obama was foreign-born, but lots of Obama dead-enders did. And because they opted to inhabit their own parallel universe where key questions about Obama's birth supposedly still lingered, they ought to be completely ignored. (When not being thoroughly mocked, that is.)

Yet today, even after their conspiracy theory collapsed, Malcolm pretends the clueless birthers were serious people raising serious questions. That they were merely “skeptics.” Ah, just like 9/11 Truthers were merely “skeptics” about what happened on that fateful day; skeptics who were stonewalled by the Bush administration, right Andrew?

Note to Malcolm: The birther story is gone for good. (And Obama won.) It's time to give up the ghost.