Exceptionally stupid. Although, if he’s intent on digging up background on The One, I wouldn’t mind seeing what he comes up with by way of transcripts from Columbia.

“It’s an insult to his mother and to his father, and I knew his mother and father; they were my friends, and I have an emotional interest in that,” Governor Abercrombie said in a telephone interview late Thursday. “It’s an emotional insult. It is disrespectful to the president; it is disrespectful to the office.”

The governor, a Democrat and former congressman, said he has initiated conversations with the state’s attorney general and the chief of its Health Department about how he can release more explicit documentation of Mr. Obama’s birth on Aug. 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Maternity and Gynecological Hospital. He said he has done so of his own accord, without consulting the White House, which declined to comment…

Mr. Abercrombie, 72, said that although he did not see the elder Obamas at the hospital with their newborn son, he did remember the couple bringing the baby to social events. He says the critics who suggest that Mr. Obama’s mother slipped off to Kenya to give birth are engaging in a “demonological fantasy.” And he is angry about legislation in several states that would require presidential candidates to document that they were born in this country. A similar bill died in Congress last year.

First, and apropos of nothing, my mind is blown by the fact that the governor of Hawaii remembers the president of the United States as an infant. But never mind that. Why is this tool dredging up an issue that, mercifully, had begun to go away? Hawaii’s records department received only 16 requests for Obama’s birth certificate in November, down from 50 or so a month last year. Higher courts have waved away multiple Birther petitions, and the court-martial of Lt. Col. Terry Lakin ended with him pleading guilty to failing to report for duty. This subject has no traction, in other words, either legally or in mainstream media, and thus had probably never been fringier when Abercrombie spoke up and decided to treat it as a problem that needs solving. Even his personal testimony about having seen Obama as a baby in Hawaii won’t count for anything among true believers, since he admits that he wasn’t at the hospital for the delivery — which is too bad, since it would have been fun to watch them come up with theories to explain even that inconvenient fact away. (It was a changeling!)

This guy’s now placed himself in the following position. Either he inadvertently revives the Birther movement by crusading for a new law to make long-form birth certificates public without the approval of the individuals to whom they belong or he decides nothing can be done legally and backs off, which will itself inflame Birthers by inspiring dark theories about pressure on him from the White House to quiet down. And of course, since Abercrombie’s a liberal Democrat, if he does somehow manage to produce the long-form certificate and it confirms that Obama’s birth happened as alleged, skeptics will dismiss it as a forgery planted by an ideological ally to throw Birthers off the scent of the “real” birth certificate. He can’t win here. Why would he even try?