Horowitz's NewsReal slams Hannity's embrace of birtherism

From a December 10 entry at David Horowitz's NewsReal blog titled, “Sean Hannity and Birtherism: Give to Idiocy No Sanction”:

Media Matters is disseminating audio from Sean Hannity's December 8, radio show, in which he takes a challenge from a caller over his support for conservative website WorldNetDaily, which is also one of the Right's most aggressive advocates of paranoia over President Barack Obama's birth certificate.

[...]

Maybe it was legitimate to ask when the story first broke, but regardless of who did the original asking, the caller is right that it has been repeatedly investigated, answered, and should be a dead issue now. During the 2008 campaign, blogger John Hawkins ran down the case against Birtherism for Townhall.com:

- The people at FactCheck.org have seen the certificate of live birth provided from the state of Hawaii to the Obama campaign and it is genuine.

- Although Hawaii state law prohibits the release of a certified birth certificate to persons who do not have a tangible interest in the vital record, the director of Hawaii's Department of Health has certified that Obama does have a legitimate birth certificate on file in Hawaii.

- In a print copy of the 1961 Honolulu Advertiser, there's a notice that Barack Obama was born. In and of itself, this is a game, set, match conversation-ender on this subject unless people want to argue that this isn't genuine or that there was a conspiracy going all the way back to the day of Obama's birth to make him President.

A few additional points: FactCheck.org is not infallible, but their report on the birth certificate is substantive and detailed. Hawaii's Health Director, Chiyome Fukino, is a Republican. As I've noted elsewhere, the Right's most prominent (and most conservative) voices have all rejected Birtherism.

WorldNetDaily, however, obsessively clings to any bizarre hypothetical that might explain how a Kenyan-born Obama got illicit citizenship credentials (indeed, their front page still hosts links to their full coverage of Birthergate, "Where's the birth certificate?" postcards, and a petition demanding that the President release the certificate). This isn't due diligence; it's a cottage industry.

As David Swindle has pointed out, Birtherism is a poison to conservative credibility, and by drinking it we play right into the Left's propagandizing hands. Sean Hannity's defense of “asking questions” is all well and good, but for all our sakes, he needs to recognize the difference between asking a question and ignoring the answer.

Previously: Hannity: Given his father's birthplace, what's wrong with asking if Obama has a “legitimate birth certificate?”