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Friday, September 16, 2016

One Time With The Birthers

Since Hillary Clinton has been losing steam in the election and sinking in the polls, her friends in the media have trotted out the issue of birthers, people who said that Barack Obama was not born in the USA and therefore was not eligible to be president.  Years ago, Donald Trump had called for Obama to produce his birth certificate, something that Obama eventually did.  That was the end of that.  Still, for the media to hit Trump with the birther stuff now was a clear attempt to change the subject to something more acceptable to Hillary.

Today, Trump addressed the whole birther thing.  He held an event in DC to announce the support he had just gotten from nearly 50 additional generals and admirals.  At the very end, he said that Hillary Clinton had started the birther fuss in 2008 and he (Trump) had ended it, a reference to his demand for the birth certificate which Obama eventually produced.  Trump took no questions and said he would now go back to addressing the problems of the country.

Hillary's allies in the media were fit to be tied.  The only sound bite they had from Trump blamed Hillary for starting the rumor in the first place.  That's not easy to use.  They decided to play the bite but to denounce it as false.  That strategy lasted about two hours, however, because Hillary's campaign manager from the first part of 2008 admitted on CNN that a staffer on the Clinton campaign in 2008 had spread the rumor that Obama was born abroad.  Patty Solis Doyle, the Clinton campaign manager, even told Wolf Blitzer that she had called the head of Obama's campaign to apologize for the move by the campaign staffer who got fired.  So the head of Hillary's campaign admitted that Trump was not wrong at all.  That makes it really hard for the media to use this as a club with which to hit Trump.

The real truth is that this whole subject is nonsense.  I wrote years ago, that it made no difference.  Even had Obama been born to an American mother and a foreign father in Kenya, Obama would still be a natural born American citizen just the same way that Ted Cruz is.  None of this matters.

 

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