I’m a birther! Well, not really.

As long as people are screeching about the president’s birthplace, the number of votes he got in Florida, or, ahem, the famous blue dress, they aren’t paying attention to the legislation he’s forcing.

The birthers have a point. Not a very good one, but they have one. Why? The empirical evidence is overwhelming against their case, but still, it endures. It is laughable at best to think that almost 50 years ago Barack Obama’s grandparents sat around their kitchen table in sunny Hawaii and seriously had the “let’s put a fake birth announcement in two papers because in 50 years our Kenyan-born grandson will have moved to Indonesia then America, gone to school and decided to run for and be elected president of the United States” discussion.

Still, rumors surrounding his upbringing persist. Why? Because it took President Obama too many years to finally release the necessary documentation to address the concerns about his citizenship, and even then, he grumbled about it like a spoiled child. If Obama has nothing to hide, why did it take a billionaire developer’s constant drum beat and the release of a book on the subject to finally prod Obama to do what he should have done way back when he announced his candidacy for president?

I don’t buy his “I don’t wish to dignify this with a response” response. Not one bit. The man is the leader of the free world, and with a job like that comes an inhuman amount of scrutiny. If he didn’t want that scrutiny, then perhaps he should have stayed home and not run for office. In our 24/7 information age, Americans desire and deserve to know these things. If there is a question about them, releasing as much information as possible is the right thing to do. Americans hunger for information, and we function better as a society when it’s out in the open. It’s disappointing that the White House has subjected the American people to this kabuki theater for this long, but the evidence clearly shows that President Barack Obama is an American citizen, born in Hawaii. Get over it.

Without a whisper of a doubt, Obama bungled this issue. Badly. As Americans, we deserve better than this. It is insulting to our intelligence to let these rumors persist if there is no truth to them. Presidents love their manufactured scandals, there is no question.

Things like that make for juicy tidbits above the fold, but they don’t advance the political debate in this country.

It’s time we get past this. We as Americans are above this, and frankly, as President Obama faces reelection next year, there are countless issues he must be held accountable for. Nationalizing our industries and failing at it, taking our budget deficits to stratospheric levels and continued dishonesty on issues like closing Guantanamo Bay. Do we really need to be wasting precious oxygen debating where he was born?

I am glad this long-form birth certificate business can finally be put to rest. With it, I’m hoping the letters asking me to write about Obama’s citizenship will cease, as well. The man is an American. He’s our president. He’s also facing reelection, so let’s devote our time to discussing real, important things like a new undeclared war in Libya and almost $5-a-gallon gas. These are the things that matter to us here in Nevada, and this is what the debate should be about. Election season is just getting off the ground, and make no mistake, I will spend plenty of time pointing out Obama’s pluses and minuses. As Americans, we deserve nothing less. President Barack Obama has an uphill climb to convince the American people he should be awarded a second term, but do we really need to waste our time debating his birthplace?