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So, the other week, being interviewed on the Daily Show, Rachel Maddow rightly laughed at the idea that killing Osama bin Laden was somehow a distraction ploy from Obama's birth certificate.
She was right because that's a silly idea.
However, I have this suspicion, that just won't go away, that the release of the President's long form birth certificate and the killing of Osama bin Laden were nonetheless connected events.
My theory goes like this.
The Obama Administration knew they had a lock on bin Laden's location, and they knew they were looking to make a move. However, it was vital that not a hint of this escape, for at least two significant reasons:
1) So that no-one who might possibly risk conveying that information to bin Laden get any kind of tip-off.
This includes the American news media, who are, at present, not necessarily particularly responsible about what sort of information they broadcast, or speculate about, or, well, anything at all.
2) So that if something went wrong, they might have some hope of burying the whole thing, or at least limiting the damage it would do.
No-one there wants Obama to be the next Carter, with the monumental cockup that was made of an attempted operation in the Middle East in the last year of his presidency.
Which means they would have wanted to distract the White House press corps and the rest of the political media and punditry as comprehensively as possible. The upcoming major operation was going to see quite a few high-level Administration figures being preoccupied in ways that might otherwise seem abnormal, which could, if noticed, trigger wild speculation that the Administration was Up To Something - particularly if the operation went badly.
However, they had this thing, where for several years, a lot of people had been clamouring, for no actual worthwhile reason, for Mr Obama's original, long-form birth certificate. It was an issue the President clearly felt, even at the release press conference, was patently stupid. But it was one which would, without doubt, make one hell of a splash.
In many ways, I'd argue, it was not politically advantageous to release the certificate then. I think it would actually be in the Democrats' interest to have let Donald Trump continue clowning around for a while longer, keeping the Republican primary contenders disordered - there's no way to build towards any kind of coherent political message while he's there, America's own answer to Berlusconi, the centre of all the coverage.
But Trump's sideshow wasn't going to take everyone's attention off the actual Administration completely - if nothing else, they were getting watched for reactions, for anything that made for new stories.
The birth certificate did. For a few days, the media were all over it, centred on a complete non-issue that couldn't actually make Obama look bad. It was a circus that could have buried an awful lot, including a Navy SEAL mission in Pakistan that, say, raided a suspected Al-Qaida compound but didn't go that well - had that happened.
And nobody was paying attention to the senior Administration figures.
I'm not sure if they wouldn't have done it anyway, but Obama's performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner in some ways doubled down on that tactic - briefly putting the spotlight back on Donald Trump and giving everyone some more birth certificate-related footage and quotables to spin that story out some more.
If I'm right, I'm also in awe. I think it's brilliant statecraft - a way of controlling the media without, in any way, shape or form, constraining its freedom, using the chattering punditry against itself.
As an act of political sleight-of-hand, it's without parallel that I can recall.
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