Fox News entertainers can't get story straight

Let me preface this commentary by explaining that I do not watch either Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck.

I don't have to.

WND visitors send me so many video clippings from these shows, pointing out the good, the bad and the ugly, there's no need for me to devote two hours a day tuned to the tube.

Lately, it seems, O'Reilly and Beck have been teaming up – doing each other's shows. Such was the case recently when Beck visited the set of "The O'Reilly Factor," where they exchanged ignorances on what we call "the eligibility issue."

One thing this pair has in common is their steadfast belief that Barack Obama has somehow proven he is constitutionally eligible to serve in the White House – or so they suggest. They routinely engage in ad hominem attacks on "loons" and "conspiracy nuts" who believe otherwise.

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To say Beck and O'Reilly are obsessed with ridiculing Americans who believe the Constitution has been dishonored by Barack Obama's steadfast refusal to release any meaningful documentation of his eligibility, his education, his travels, his health and his life story in general would be an understatement.

They are on a mission – one that apparently requires them to be less than honest about their own beliefs on the matter. Either that or they are both terribly confused about what they believe.

What do I mean?

Beck was on O'Reilly's show a few days ago bantering about their favorite topic – the lunacy of people like me and probably most members of their audiences.

And there was O'Reilly, again, last Friday, weaving one of the most fantastic conspiracy tales ever conceived – that Obama actually wants Americans obsessing about his birth certificate. In fact, he suggested, Obama created this issue intentionally.

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"I think the reason they didn't ever produce the birth certificate is because they wanted these loons out there," he told Beck.

Did you catch that? O'Reilly has been telling the world for months and months that Obama has released his birth certificate. But here is O'Reilly contradicting these assertions by admitting Obama has done nothing of the kind – a fact an increasing number of Americans already know.

In other words, O'Reilly slipped.

And Beck was right there to catch him – prop him up again, get him back on the script.

"Hang on," Beck reminded O'Reilly. "I think he has produced the birth certificate, the one that Hawaii ..."

"We have a facsimile," O'Reilly asserted. "But I want him to send (the original) directly to me."

The story keeps changing. I've seen O'Reilly say time and again that he doesn't care about the original birth certificate – that he could see it any time he wanted. Now, suddenly, he wants it sent to him. Why? I thought he wasn't curious about it. I thought he was satisfied with Obama's cover story. I thought he believed those wanting to see it were nuts.

But it gets crazier still.

Beck now says Obama has released his birth certificate. Right?

Well, that's not what he said on his own radio show just last month – Jan. 4 to be precise.

"Hold on," he said. "I know it's way out on a limb here. But as the guy who the media says is the king of conspiracy theories, all I do are forward conspiracy theories, let me forward this conspiracy. He (Obama) was born here because it seems a little unlikely that somebody planted the birth records, OK, a little unlikely, in the newspapers. Now, you would say, 'Well, then why doesn't he just produce? Good question. That one kept me up for minutes at a time, minutes."

Beck went on with his conspiratorial suggestion that Obama wants the nation wondering whether he is a legitimate president or not.

But notice the italicized portion of Beck's statement. It strongly suggests Beck doesn't believe Obama has produced his real birth certificate. What other conclusion can we draw?

O'Reilly can't keep his story straight – and neither can Beck.

Do you see my problem here?

These guys are ridiculing you and me for demanding to see the one and only document that could even begin to prove Obama's constitutional eligibility. And, they both admit, in rare moments of candor, that he hasn't. They believe he is deliberately holding it back – as do I. But they believe he's doing it because it somehow distracts attention from all the evil things he's doing in Washington. While I believe he's doing it because he has something to hide.

Why am I nuts and they think they're sane?

And while I'm at it, let's deal with the newspaper announcements in the Hawaiian papers, which seems to have persuaded Beck and others beyond any shadow of a doubt that Obama was actually born in that state.

Nobody "planted" those newspaper announcements. If Beck had ever been a journalist, he would understand how birth announcements get in big-city dailies. They are not mailed in by parents. They are generated either by hospitals or, in the case of Hawaii, by the state health department – the same authority that apparently issued the document Obama claims as his "birth certificate," actually a "certification of live birth."

I have little doubt that such a document was issued by the state of Hawaii. Parents could easily obtain those documents for births that took place out of the state or even out of the country. So the newspaper announcements prove nothing. They are merely evidence that Obama was actually issued the document we've all seen already – not a birth certificate, not an original, typewritten paper signed by an independent eyewitness, not a contemporaneous form filled out in a hospital, but a digital record the entire world has seen and acknowledged.

Let's be serious for a moment: Beck and O'Reilly are great entertainers. But they are not serious journalistic investigators. Their realm is not that of people who actually put shoe leather on the ground and dig up stories. Details, corroborating evidence, primary sources, research, reporting – it's all foreign to them. Once they make up their minds about something, it's all too easy for them to selectively compile facts to bolster their arguments.

And, sometimes, in their attempts to explain away inconvenient facts and conjure up their own wild conspiracy theories, they slip up, contradict themselves and expose their own shallow narrative.