If Bush had given the same speech, there would have been no controversy. Indeed, he gave similar speeches after 9/11 trying to calm feelings of Islamophobia here and abroad.

But when you start with the presumption that Obama is less American than most of the rest of us, it becomes easy to find something sinister in virtually everything he says. And clearly many Americans see him as less of a real American than themselves. Why else would Obama have been singled out among all the 2008 presidential hopefuls as the one whose birth certificate we needed to see. Nobody even asked to see certificates for Hillary, Huckabee or any of the other candidates. Hmm, inquiring minds want to know what the difference is between Obama and all those others.