American Prospect:Campaign has descended into Madness

[ginnyinWI]

http://prospect.org/article/presidential-campaign-has-descended-madness

My friends, we have fallen down the rabbit hole. This presidential campaign has completely departed from ordinary reality, into a place where there's no such thing as truth and accountability is a joke—at least for some. I wish I could tell you with confidence that it all will work out in the end, that the electorate will be wise and thoughtful, that we'll only shake our heads and chuckle when we think back on 2016. But I'm no longer so sure.

This is the sequence of events we witnessed over the last few days. On Friday, Donald Trump held an event at which he finally gave up the malignant crusade he has been on for the last five years to convince people that President Obama was not born in the United States. In doing so, however, he told a breathtakingly brazen lie: "Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy." There just isn't any debate about this: Neither Clinton nor her campaign ever mentioned the scurrilous rumors about Obama's birthplace in 2008. And in many of the news reports about Trump's event, reporters were unusually forthright in calling this lie for what it was.

Yet by Sunday morning, every Republican had obviously gotten the message: Don't worry about the fact-checks, don't worry about whether everyone knows we're lying, just keep repeating over and over that Hillary Clinton started birtherism.

And so they did. If you were unfortunate enough to watch the Sunday shows, you were fed this rancid tripe with a shovel. "Associates of the Clinton campaign started this Birtherism question in 2007," said Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on Meet the Press. "We were reminding people where this started. It was used as a smear against Senator Obama by Clinton campaign associates." Later in the program, Republican consultant Alex Castellanos had the gall to complain that the media were being unfair to Trump by tarring him with birtherism. "I think these two candidates are being treated very differently on this very issue, because this is something that Hillary Clinton's campaign started when it was convenient for her. But the media covers it as if it is only Donald Trump" who's been a birther.