The last people you may want to hear more about are the birthers, sore losers who dispute or question Obama’s election on the grounds that he was (or, for the insinuating Lou Dobbs, “may” have been) born in Kenya. Ergo he’s not, or may not be, a “natural-born citizen of the United States” as the Constitution requires.

But this view is so persistent that sensible voices have to keep debunking it. Alas, those voices—most recently NPR News and its weekly On the Media, Eugene Robinson in yesterday’s Washington Post, Steve Beren in the Washington Monthly, and E.J. Dionne in a column reprinted in yesterday’s Seattle Times—cite only one of two bodies of fact, each sufficient to disprove the claim. They note that Obama’s birth in Honolulu is confirmed by a birth certificate (itself confirmed by Hawaii’s health director and its Republican governor) and notices in both local papers.

That may be more documentation than you and I can show for our birthplaces. It ought to be enough. But sticking to the birthplace “issue” lets the birth berserkers (as the Monthly calls them) keep coming back with fantasies of an infant Manchurian Candidate and bogus evidence such as a 1964 birth certificate from the “Republic of Kenya” dated eight months before Kenya became a republic.

All of this isn’t just wacky, it’s irrelevant. The birthplace point is moot. Obama would qualify as a “natural born Citizen” anyway. He’s the son of an uncontested citizen, Ann Durham Soetero of Kansas, Texas, California, Hawaii, and Mercer Island, Washington, She’d lived in the U.S. at . least five years, two of them after the age of 14. That’s the paternity/maternity standard, summarized here by the U.S. State Department.

If Obama didn’t qualify, neither would three past Republican candidates— John McCain, born in the Panama Canal Zone, Paris-born Lowell Weicker, and Mexico City-born George Romney, the father of once and future presidential contender Mitt.

What’s remarkable is that all this goes unmentioned in all the gnashing over the birther business. Unless the conspiracy cuts much deeper, across partisan lines. Hmmm…. Like father, like son? Has anyone seen Mitt Romney’s birth certificate?