Now that President Obama has produced his birth certificate — again — it doesn’t mean that the issue has been dispensed with. As I noted earlier, there are those who will never believe it.

What today’s release does is mark a very clear line — as if it had to be — between the reasonable and the loons. Anyone who calls into question the president’s birth certificate is in the same category as those people who deny the Holocaust, believe the Apollo 11 landing was faked, are sure that JFK survived and is being kept alive deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, and that Elvis is running a Burger King in Grand Rapids.

In a way, this was a pretty deft move on the part of the president: he’s boxed in the wingnuts and they know it. Watching the nutsery contingent on Hardball do everything but splutter and hiss has a high entertainment factor, and now we can move on to more serious matters, such as who’s going to replace Charlie Sheen on Two and a Half Men. Donald Trump, perhaps?