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Anderson Cooper Confronts Birther Legislator (VIDEO)

First Posted: 04-22-10 10:54 AM | Updated: 04-22-10 11:35 AM

Have you heard that the Birthers are making a comeback? They are, baby! Straight up passing laws in Arizona that would require presidential candidates to submit their birth certificates in order to get ballot access for the election. It's just one thing that is making Arizona, in the words of State Representative Kyrsten Sinema (D-Phoenix), "the laughing stock of the nation".

But State Representaitve Cecil Ash (R-Mesa) supports the measure -- not because he thinks President Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States... no, no! -- simply because it would help to remove doubts. It's all part of that small government ethos that maintains that the power of an intrusive state government can and should be brought to bear in order to alleviate the silly concerns of legitimately crazy people.

So, last night, Anderson Cooper took up the issue on his eponymous CNN show, and more or less laid the wood to Ash, who reiterated his point about the need to dispel the "controversy."

ASH: Anderson, I think there's been a lot of controversy over the issue, created a division among a lot of people in the United States, for better or worse, many people don't believe he is a U.s. citizen, they believe he has divided loyalties, i suppose you could say.

COOPER: Right, but those people are wrong, he is a U.S. citizen.

ASH: You're telling me that he's wrong. I've never investigated that. If he is, he has nothing to fear.

Also? He has "nothing to fear" because as Cooper noted, those people are wrong! But look: this is precisely how juvenile this stuff gets:

COOPER: But I mean the information is out there, it has been released, it has been shown there are some people who don't believe it but there are also some people that believe the moon is made out of cheese. You can say you never investigated it but I think you would probably say the moon is not made out of cheese.

ASH: I certainly would.

Things just devolve from there. Cooper points out that Ash continually made contentions to his producer prior to the segment -- for example, that Obama spent a million dollars "fighting the release" of his birth certificate, and asserting a further Birther controversy that stemmed from an April Fools Day joke -- that are demonstrably, objectively wrong, and his excuse every time is that he hasn't "investigated" it. Essentially, Ash just gets calls from loony-poons in his district and starts carving out whole chunks of his day to address their concerns. (In which case, the law should be called the "Arizona Is Full Of Morons Who Need To Be Babied Through Their Hysterical Episodes Of Stupidity Act of 2010." I would support this legislation's passage!)

Anyway, people should totally jam Ash's office with calls about how they are worried about the presence of sexy, glittery teen vampires in their communities.

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