Donald Trump hires a team to investigate Obama's birth, Sarah Palin approves

Donald Trump has personally hired a team of investigators and has sent them to Hawaii to look for evidence of the president's (fake) birth. Which doesn't make sense, since not finding evidence that you don't want to find doesn't really prove much. Except that's not the point.

The point is that, in our current political climate, this is somehow considered a cool thing to do by a segment of the voting public. Even among those people who don't agree. Sarah Palin, who thinks Barack Obama was "probably" born in Hawaii, heartily approves of Trump's plan. She says:

I appreciate that Donald wants to spend his resources in getting to the bottom of something that so interests him and many Americans... 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. But obviously there's something there that the president doesn't want people to see on that birth certificate. ... He's going to great lengths to make sure it isn't shown. And that's kind of perplexing for a lot of people.

She is, in other words, trying shamelessly to appease the birther crowd without actually going to the fact-denying lengths required to be one. So, she casts the whole birth announcement in the newspaper as a kind of "one woman's opinion" thing. Not, like, a factual thing. 

The one upshot of all of this is that we can more or less assume that neither will actually run — since Palin's not going to, and Trump is demonstrating himself to be more of a far-right nutter than Palin. Which means we can file this whole thing as a really annoying commercial for The Apprentice and go back to our lives.