Has there ever been a more absurdly surreal moment, even in US politics, that unchallengeable theatre of the absurd and the surreal? One moment, we were watching a property magnate, with one eye on the presidency, the other on his reality TV show ratings, and puffed up like a bullfrog, rejoicing on an airport tarmac in New Hampshire that America's President of two years had finally made public his birth certificate.
The next, America's TV networks interrupted their schedules to cut to the White House, where that self-same President appeared to confirm the momentous fact: not that Barack Obama had indeed been born, but that the happy event indeed took place, as no sane person has ever doubted, on the unimpeachably American soil of Hawaii, one August evening in 1961.
Of late, however, America has seemed to be taking leave of its senses. A quarter of the population, polls showed, and close on half of Republicans, still refused to believe that unassailable fact.
Yesterday, in a bid to finally close the discussion, the White House released Mr Obama's original "long form" birth certificate, rather than the computer-generated duplicate with which the world thus far has had to make do. It is signed by his mother, the doctor who delivered him and the local registrar.
For the benefit of those who have been living – either literally or metaphorically – on a different planet for the last few years, the document bears witness that Barack Hussein Obama was born to Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Senior at 7.24pm on August 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynaecological Hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii's capital city.
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