See also: What Reggie Love Had to Say about the Obama Birth Certificate by Nick Chase

Most of the talk about the recently released Reggie Love interview centers on Love's admission that he and President Obama played cards -- Sp***s to be precise -- during the Osama bin Laden raid. But Love, Obama's "body man" for several years, revealed more than the White House wanted him to about Obama's notorious birth certificate.

At a forum hosted last month hosted by the Artists & Athletes Alliance in Los Angeles, Love jovially recalled the moment when Obama "finally found" his birth certificate.

The moderator chimed in mischievously: "It took a little too long, by the way." Said Love in response, "Hey, when you come from . . . " before catching his thought and cutting himself off. 

Love then went on to explain the delay, saying that when "your parents don't live together (and) you travel all over the world, documents get lost." Although the Artists & Athletes Alliance has pulled the video, the highlights are available here.

This conversation presumes that the birth certificate was lost and then found, but that was never the issue during the protracted hunt for the elusive birth certificate. The issue, the media assured us, was that the president should not have had to bother himself with the demands of some fringe Obama-haters.

Here is how the Washington Post trumpeted the birth certificate's release in April 2011, "After refusing for more than two years to indulge the most corrosive of conspiracy theories questioning his legitimacy, President Obama finally decided he'd had enough."

According to the Post, Obama ordered White House counsel Robert Bauer to work with Hawaiian state authorities to produce a longer and more detailed version of the birth certificate than the one Obama floated during the 2008 campaign. After several days of "intense, secret maneuvering" Obama secured the long form certificate and appeared in the White House briefing room to herald its arrival.

For support, then Hawaiian governor Neil Abercrombie sent out a press release that quoted Hawaii Director of Health Loretta Fuddy. We hope that issuing you these copies of your original Certificate of Live Birth will end the numerous inquiries received by the Hawaii Department of Health to produce this document," said Fuddy obligingly. "Such inquires have been disruptive to staff operations and have strained State resources." She added that she herself had "seen the original records."

Said Abercrombie in conclusion, "President Obama's mother and father were dear friends of mine, and we must respect their memory. It is an insult to the President, his parents and to the Office to suggest that he was not born in Hawaii."

Abercrombie, unfortunately, is a proven dissembler. As the Washington Post's David Maraniss revealed in his 2012 biography, "Barack Obama: The Story," just about everything we have been told about Obama's parents was "received myth, not the truth," including the notion that the parents were "dear friends" of anyone. Given Abercrombie's involvement in this affair, the information in the press release should not be accepted uncritically.

As the president told the story at his 2004 convention debut, he was the product of an "improbable love" between a girl from Kansas and a goatherd from Kenya who shared a "faith in the possibilities of this nation." He would periodically buttress the myth by claiming that Obama Sr. "left when I was 2 years old." This implies, of course, that there was a home and family to leave.

Maraniss concedes that no credible witness can remember seeing his parents together. "In the college life of Barack Obama in 1961 and 1962," writes Maraniss, "as recounted by his friends and acquaintances in Honolulu, there was no Ann; there was no baby."  Only Abercrombie claimed to have seen the pair together during the presumed courtship stage, but he is not close to credible.

"Maybe I'm the only one in the country," Abercrombie told the Los Angeles Times in December 2010, "that could look you right in the eye right now and tell you, 'I was here when that baby was born.'" This was pure lie, no other word for it.

A few days later, Abercrombie clarified to Mark Niesse of the Associated Press that he did not exactly see Obama's parents with their newborn son at the hospital, but that he "remembers seeing Obama as a child with his parents at social events." Another lie. Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama's mother, was in Seattle with her son weeks after his August 1961 birth. Obama Sr. left Hawaii before she returned.

Maraniss, I should add, is no fan of mine. He classed me among the "obsessed conspiratorialists" who bedeviled his book's release. At the heart of my derangement, Maraniss believes, is "the notion that the president was not born in the United States." No, I never said that. What I had been saying is what Maraniss finally conceded, namely that the much bruited notion of Obama's blessed multicultural origins was "received myth, not the truth."

Like Obama's other mainstream biographers -- the New Yorker's David Remnick, the New York Times' Janny Scott and the Boston Globe's Sally Jacobs -- Maraniss set out not to discover where Obama was born, but to prove he was born in Hawaii. None of them succeeded.

Maraniss did not talk to anyone who had anything even remotely to do with Obama's birth. The reader has no idea where Stanley Ann Dunham spent the six months prior to the birth, how she got to the hospital, who took her home, where she went when she left the hospital, or how she managed to show up in Seattle a few weeks later.

The only confirming detail comes from a former teacher of Obama's.  She told Maraniss that sometime after the birth, a doctor told her that he had heard on the grapevine that "Stanley had a baby," it being unusual that a "Stanley" would have had a baby.  She is alleged to have remembered this anecdote for nearly 50 years before tying it to Obama and presumably settling the birther issue.  I do not know how an anecdote this sketchy could have made it by the editor.

Then too, there was Obama's own casual admission in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, of finding an article about Obama Sr. "folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms."

No, Reggie, nothing was lost. Nothing needed to be found. The only thing missing all these years has been the truth.

Jack Cashill's new book on the Zimmerman trial, If I Had A Son, is available for pre-order.