Good on National Review

For those who remember their history, it was National Review under William F Buckley that did an invaluable service to Conservatism during the 1960s by making a concerted effort to break from the John Birch Society movement. The Birchers, founded in 1958, held some outlandish views - calling Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower Communist sympathisizers were among their more famous proclamations.

Well, today National Review again puts common sense ahead of insanity with an editorial that attempts to put the Birther speculation to bed:

Much foolishness has become attached to the question of President Obama’s place of birth, and a few misguided souls among the Right have indulged it. The myth that Barack Obama is ineligible to be president represents the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of his election and presidency disappear.

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One of the unfortunate consequences of this red-herring discussion is that there are plenty of questions about Obama’s background and history that we would like to have answered. In spite of two books of memoirs, there remain murky areas in his biography. And when it comes to those college transcripts, count us among those who’d love to know whether Dr. Bailout ever took an advanced economics class and how he performed in it.

Barack Obama may prefer European-style socialized health care. He may consider himself a citizen of the Earth and sometimes address his audiences as “people of the world,” as though he were born not in another country but on another planet. Like Bruce Springsteen, he has a lot of bad political ideas; but he was born in the U.S.A.