Aside from the genuinely whacked-out folks who bought into the fantasy that Barack Obama refused to release his long-form “Certificate of Live Birth” in order to conceal details of his foreign birth, the whole point of the “birther” movement has always been to emphasize that the president’s father was an African.

Yes, yes, of course, Obama wrote a best-selling book about his father’s Kenyan roots and residency.

But the “birthers” aren’t all that into books.

They wanted a nice, simple way to say: “Obama’s a foreigner.”

Now that the president has released his Hawaiian birth certificate—in response to the antics of Donald “Obama: You’re Fired” Trump—the crudest of the nativists among the “birther” crowd will find some scant satisfaction in the fact that Barack Hussein Obama II is, in fact, confirmed to be the Honolulu-born son of Barack Hussein Obama, who is duly noted on the certificate as an “African” university student from “Kenya, East Africa.”

So there you have it, Obama is a little bit “foreign”—just like Willard Mitt Romney, erstwhile contender for the Republican nomination to challenge Obama.

If Romney is nominated, then the 2012 contest will be between two sons of foreign-born fathers.

Romney’s dad, George, was born in Mexico, where the Romney clan had decamped with their co-religionists after authorities in the United States barred polygamy.

So Obama is every bit as American as Mitt Romney and, amusingly, Donald Trump.

Trump’s mother, Mary MacLeod, was born at Tong, Stornoway on Scotland’s Isle of Lewis. Like Obama’s dad, and Romney’s dad, Trump’s mom was (gasp) not a native of the United States.

Troubling?

Not to Thomas Jefferson (mom born in England), Andrew Jackson (both parents born in Ireland), James Buchanan’s (father born in Ireland), Chester Arthur (father born in Ireland), Woodrow Wilson (mother born in England) or Herbert Hoover (mother born in Canada).