“Trump is suddenly ‘winning’ as a political figure because the political class has failed. The authority of our political institutions is weak and getting weaker; it’s not that Americans ‘lack trust’ in them, as blue ribbon pundits and sociologists often lament, so much as they lack respect for the people inside them…

“No amount of His Trumpness can renew or replace American political authority. Republicans make a dangerous mistake when they think of politics as a pathological farce that can only be cured by a business worldview that sees economics as the master science. Even though, as Tocqueville observes, money really is more important in democratic times, money is not the measure of all things. We — we Republicans, we Democrats, we Americans — still need politicians who can rule wisely, bravely, and well. Look at what’s behind the huge novelty of Trump’s rise, and you find a venerable truth. There is no substitute for statesmen.”

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“‘It’s kind of ludicrous at this point,’ Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the former director of Hawaii’s Department of Health, said in a rare telephone interview with NBC…

“[Fukino said] that the original so-called ‘long form’ birth certificate — described by Hawaiian officials as a ‘record of live birth’ — absolutely exists, located in a bound volume in a file cabinet on the first floor of the state Department of Health. Fukimo said she has personally inspected it — twice. The first time was in late October 2008, during the closing days of the presidential campaign, when the communications director for the state’s then Republican governor, Linda Lingle (who appointed Fukino) asked if she could make a public statement in response to claims then circulating on the Internet that Obama was actually born in Kenya.

“Before she would do so, Fukino said, she wanted to inspect the files — and did so, taking with her the state official in charge of vital records. She found the original birth record, properly numbered, half typed and half handwritten, and signed by the doctor who delivered Obama, located in the files…

“‘It is real, and no amount of saying it is not, is going to change that,’ Fukino said.”

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“During an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller on Thursday, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said businessman and potential 2012 GOP primary candidate Donald Trump deserves to be taken seriously as a legitimate candidate, noting that ‘Donald Trump comes to the race with some notoriety — people know who he is.’

“But when it came to Trump’s questioning whether or not President Obama was born in the U.S., Rubio said: ‘I would suggest — if he asked for my opinion — not to focus so much on that issue. There are more important things facing our country. I believe Barack Obama was born in the United States of America …So why are we talking about this?'”

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“He’s tackling this birth thing head on. I mean head on. And they can’t say that Trump is part of the Tea Party. He’s not there. I mean he’s a marginal Republican in terms of the way people classify, but I mean nobody is out there tackling this the way he is. I actually think, by the way, that Trump is providing a blueprint here. The way to beat Obama 2012 is to just go at him. Everybody lives in this media-created fantasy that the guy’s unbeatable, that he’s the greatest orator in the world. You get him away from the prompter, I’m serious, and he’s lost. He’s a gaffe machine. He and Biden are in the same class, and it doesn’t take long to call the roll.

“There’s a mythology that has been created about Obama that unnecessarily makes people afraid, and Trump is illustrating the way to do this, and Paul Ryan’s budget, just go right after him. You just go right after him, instead of pussyfooting around, worrying about what the independents are gonna say or worried about what the people that pay attention to politics two days a year are gonna say, just go after it. Last night while appearing with the Reverend Sharpton in New York, Obama said that he stood by his record the past two years, said he is proud of what he’s accomplished. Well, what is that? What has he accomplished? That’s not an achievement. That is an albatross. Obamacare? What has he accomplished as president, except ruining the economy? Is that what he’s proud of? The scary thing is it very well might be.”

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“‘I appreciate that the Donald wants to spend his resources in getting to the bottom of something that so interests him and many Americans. You know, more power to him,’ Palin said Saturday on Fox News. ‘He’s not just throwing stones from the sidelines, he’s digging in, he’s paying for researchers.’…

“‘Well, you know, I think that he was born in Hawaii because there was a birth announcement put in the newspaper,’ Palin said. ‘But obviously if there’s something there that the president doesn’t want people to see on that birth certificate that he’s going to great lengths to make sure it isn’t shown. And that’s kind of perplexing for a lot of people.'”

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