This is crazy…and sad.

This morning the White House published President Obama’s birth certificate in order to once and for all try to put a stop to the outrageous “birther movement” who stubbornly continues to argue that Obama was not born in the United States and so not eligible to be president.

On the White House website Obama’s birth certificate can be seen, both the short and the long version, and both of which state that Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii on August 4, 1961 and that his mother’s name was Stanley Ann Durham and his father’s was Barack Hussein Obama.

The long version of the birth certificate has not been previously released as the State Hawaii does not allow this. But an exception has now been made after a special request from the president.

White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer:

The President believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country. It may have been good politics and good TV, but it was bad for the American people and distracting from the many challenges we face as a country. Therefore, the President directed his counsel to review the legal authority for seeking access to the long form certificate and to request on that basis that the Hawaii State Department of Health make an exception to release a copy of his long form birth certificate. They granted that exception in part because of the tremendous volume of requests they had been getting.

And Pfeiffer adds:

The President’s hope is that with this step, we can move on to debating the bigger issues that matter to the American people and the future of the country.

Well, that remains to be seen, but it’s, unfortunately, unlikely. The president’s opponents, particularly the Tea Party movement but also possible Republican presidential candidates like Donald Trump and Michele Bachmann, are with the help of Fox News continuing to sow doubt about where Obama was born. In the latest Gallup survey, while 56 percent of the respondents say that Obama was born in the United States, 24 percent believe he was born in another country and 20 percent are not sure.

Yes, yes is crazy but it’s also sad, as Steve Benen writes on his Washington Monthly blog today following the White House action:

It was a reminder that our political discourse is deeply stupid. It was also a reminder that media outlets that already know the “birther” conspiracy theory is baseless continue to treat this garbage as a legitimate area of inquiry.