From the moment Ron Paul's campaign made the official announcement that he was forming an exploratory committee to run for President in 2012, (which basically means he's going to run) the media scrambled to reassert its self-proclaimed designation of who was and wasn't a "top tier" candidate. By positioning celebrities and fake conservative globalists as the alleged front runners, it has tried to use its diminished credibility to strengthen its control over the minds of Americans and keep the agenda for American empire on track.
The spotlight for the next GOP candidate to engage Obama in the staged 2012 grudge match was Sarah Palin. Yet, perhaps because of diminished enthusiasm from the GOP hijacked Tea Party, the focus has been taken off of her and placed on reality TV star and sleazy casino owner, Donald Trump. As the spotlight changes, however, the desperate message from the mainstream media is as clear as it was in 2008-- please...anyone but Ron Paul.
More people distrust government in 2011 than they did in 2008. More people have realized that both parties promote the same destructive agenda overseas of endless war, and the gradual eradication of civil liberties at home. On top of that, Americans have seen the result of the Federal Reserve's monetary policies that Libertarians have warned about for years begin to unravel the world financial system...all the stuff that Ron Paul warned about even before he entered the race in 2008.
This time around Ron Paul is an even bigger threat to the establishment and can't simply be laughed off.
A day after Paul's announcement, his potential rival--Trump-- was allegedly thrust into a national drama, pitting him in a confrontation with the President, played out before a live audience like wrestlers hamming it up on the microphone before a match. The official story is that Obama, having had enough of people questioning his country of origin, suddenly decided to take to the airwaves to present his "real" birth certificate. The immediate aftermath has provided a win-win situation for both men.
In Obama's case, this allows him to further settle the issue in the eyes of his supporters and the mainstream media, playing "Cool Daddy" to a public that has been conditioned into viewing the presidency as an office of comforting (and bottomless) paternal authority rather than one of civil servitude to the U.S. Constitution and its clear restrictions of power. By acting like he's taken the moral high ground in showing the birth certificate, talking now about moving on and solving real problems, he can strengthen the resolve of his supporters by pretending he's one-upped all his detractors when in fact a large majority of the people who don't support him do so not because of the hyped birther issue, but because of the very provable and damaging things he's done while in office in regards to the War of Terror and the further criminalization of ordinary Americans in the eyes of their government.
For Trump, he is now claiming victory to the hijacked GOP Tea Party/birther contingent, in that he alone was able to force the President to show the document while others have been demanding it ever since the issue was first raised during the 2008 DNC primary. Because fake conservatives also believe in the Daddy President persona, with emphasis on "strong" over "cool", his alleged forcing of the President to release the document puts him in the limelight again and makes him more attractive to the herds of Obama detractors who don't realize America's problems are bigger than just one puppet, and that Trump is being thrown to the forefront as another "non-change" candidate...like Obama was after eight years of Bush.
The issue itself is a brick wall. Nobody who has taken a position on either side will ever be swayed, regardless of what information comes out about it. The newly presented document indicates that the President was born in the United States, and yet it's not inconceivable that the document could be a forgery. (For clarification: I'm not alleging that it is, simply that if there was a cover-up going on it wouldn't be hard for the President's big money handlers to fabricate what is essentially just a piece of paper.) While all evidence presented says that the President is a natural born citizen of the United States, if there were any credence to the questions surrounding the President's birth place-- short of a video of his head crowning set against the backdrop of grass huts and prowling lions-- there would be no way to prove it.
The President's surrender of his birth certificate is a move of political chess, and a way to split the right wing faction of the increasingly angry masses in favor of an intellectually weaker and less principled potential GOP candidate in Donald Trump, taking the focus off of Ron Paul. While Fox News Kool-Aid drinkers may flock under Trump's wing like moths drawn to the light of his pretend strength, there is an almost zero percent chance that Obama's disillusioned anti-war base will shift their support in Trump's favor during a general election. Needless to say, this same base is made up mostly of registered Democrats who would have no voice in a GOP primary.
So the situation is mutually beneficial. With Obama responding to Trump's demands it not only diminishes the questions of his legitimacy but makes his supposed rival more popular to those who didn't support Obama to begin with, strengthening the fake right/left paradigm, and attacking the possibility that the only real conservative, anti-war, and pro civil liberty voice in the race will ever make it onto the same stage as the President to challenge him on his record of "change".
This is not to say that the media didn't also try to catch Paul in the birth certificate trap in order to use against him later. In many recent interviews, like this one with Chris Matthews, Paul has been aggressively prodded to weigh in on the birther issue in the slim hope that he would commit himself to a position of denying Obama's legal legitimacy to hold the office of President...unsuccessful "room for one more" moments from eager skeleton ticket-takers before the train starts moving, destined to derail, defaming him in the eyes of independents that might consider Paul a reasonable voice and a viable alternative to the pro-war rhetoric they normally hear.
The 2012 race is on, and all parties invested in the status quo are trying to avoid a repeat of Paul's 2008 rise. The reason Obama released his birth certificate is the same reason Bernanke has suddenly decided to pursue a policy of "transparency" by holding a press conference a day after Paul's announcement in order to spew pro Federal Reserve propaganda. Just as the wars of last century were fought on different fronts, with more complicated secret alliances involved, the election war of 2012 is going to be one in which the secret political alliances of the establishment left and right are bound even tighter, with the powers that be recognizing that the enemies of their enemy-- liberty, and real change-- are their friends.