Pat Boone may have dialed back the eliminationist rhetoric for his latest column (published at WorldNetDaily; it remains to be seen whether Newsmax will publish it after removing the eliminationist one), but he's still lying and misleading about Barack Obama.

Boone claims that “Candidate Obama swore that he'd veto any of these porky earmarks that found their way into any bill that crossed his desk” yet signed a bill containing “contained $7.7 billion in nearly 9,000 earmarks.” In fact, Obama never promised to eliminate earmarks; rather, he promised to reform the earmark process and eliminate wasteul spending.

Boone also writes that “Our president informed the Muslim world that 'America is no longer a Christian nation.' ” As we noted the last time he did this, Boone is taking Obama's words out of context; Obama actually said that America is not just a Christian nation but “also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, and a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”

As he has before, Boone embraces the birther movement, bashing Obama for his “steadfast refusal to provide to the public who deserves and wants it an actual copy of his birth certificate! Not the 'certification of live birth' that has been produced and accepted by a strangely gullible and meek Congress.” Boone adds:

The growing number of determined citizens who are demanding transparency are being derided and smeared as “birthers,” in the hope that they'll be written off as irrational or politically biased.

But my question is -- and has been for over a year now -- “MR. OBAMA, IF YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE, WHY ARE YOU SPENDING A FORTUNE TO HIDE IT?”

It's an acknowledged fact that Barack Obama Jr. was born to an 18-year-old American girl and a Kenyan father, a British citizen. Some have seen an actual videotape, now strangely unavailable, in which the boy's fraternal grandmother describes being in the delivery room in Mombasa, Kenya, when young Barack was born.

In fact, there is no “actual videotape” of this. There is, however, a selectively edited audio clip of a phone call made to the grandmother by Anabaptist minister Ron McRae that leaves out the part in which it appears that the grandmother's misunderstood what McRae was asking and that, when asked more directly whether Obama was born in Kenya, the grandmother's answer is no. McRae has spread other dubious claims about Obama and is apparently opposed to race-mixing.

We probably shouldn't be expecting scrupulous accuracy from retired pop idols, but couldn't Boone at least try to get his facts straight?