Almost Every Word of Donald Trump's Birther Statement is a Lie What planet is this?

[kpete]

Mike Segar/Reuters via ZUMA Press
On Thursday night Donald Trump spokesman Jason Miller sent out a statement declaring that the Republican presidential nominee believes that President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Miller's statement credited Trump with heroically pushing Obama to release his long-form birth certificate in 2011, putting an end to a "vicious and conniving" smear first crafted by Hillary Clinton in 2008.

Here's the statement:

Hillary Clinton’s campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President. This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer. Even the MSNBC show Morning Joe admits that it was Clinton’s henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump.

In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate. Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised. Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama’s birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.

Except that's not true. Indeed, virtually every line of the statement is a lie.


Hillary Clinton did not allege that the president was born in Kenya. Trump did not compel Obama to release his birth certificate "when others had not"—Obama had already released a copy of his birth certificate, but critics, including Trump, believed it to be a fake. So Obama released a longer birth certificate in 2011—but that release did not bring "closure" to the issue. Instead, Trump called it a forgery, citing "Israeli science," and announced that he was sending a team of investigators to Hawaii to uncover the truth. He suggested that a Hawaiian health official who knew of the cover-up had died in suspicious circumstances.


MORE:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/every-line-donald-trumps-birther-statement-lie

[sarae]

1. How is this not taking his original racist birther issue

and pouring gas on it? In what way is he either apologizing, taking responsibility for, or putting this issue to rest?

He's such a POS.

[Coyotl]

2. The planet where contraception leads to out-of-wedlock births, in a nation of cognitivce dissonance.

Perhaps we should campaign against stupidity and ignore the bloviator.


Except, of course, jokes and memes to ridicule the stupidity.

[Stonepounder]

3. I'm terribly afraid that the problem is not stupidity so much as intellectual laziness.

Schools no longer teach critical thinking, they teach to the test. I remember back in the 60's when I was a student at Ohio State, I was taking a Comp Lit course in my Sophomore. One of the assignments was to write a paper on the meaning of some book. (I think it was Gulliver's Travels, but I can't remember for sure.) We then spent the week with the professor calling on students in the class and making them defend their paper. There was no right or wrong answer, but you had to explain how you arrived at your 'meaning'. The idea was that you had to think.

Now it is all multiple choice with there being a 'right' answer and a 'wrong' answer, with nothing inbetween. Students are being taught to think in black and white and never see shades of gray. Unfortunately, in a society there are not easy black and white answers. Instead governments try and find solutions that are do the best and cause the least harm. And that 'right answer' 'wrong answer' has infected the body politic (exacerbated of course by unlimited funds from corporations with a vested interest in having their 'right answer').

And the media pumps out these black and white, right and wrong answers in 30 second sound bites. As I have said here and elsewhere, we no longer get 'news' we get 'infotainment' and that's what the masses are bombarded with from morning to night.

[Coyotl]

11. Television has altered the way people think and their social habits. We mimic what we see.

I recall when people conversed, they also listened. Now, try to say a complete paragraph and you get interrupted. Attention spans have been reduced to a quick sound bite. There is no greater enemy to intelligent culture than the profanity of television.

[Proud liberal 80]

4. Wow

This is going to work because they know that:

1. The MSM won't call them out for this lie
2. That the American electorate is gullible and stupid

I can hear it now, all the people who were burthers for all these years will blame Clinton, too.

[napkinz]

5. "finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion"

he is the one who STARTED it!

what a POS!

[Ilsa]

6. Morning Joe had a Politifact (?) segment that

claimed that in 2008, desperate supporters of HRC started the birther movement, but her campaign denounced them.

Then they had a clip of HRC being interviewed and asked about Obama being a muslim, and they said she was less than convincing in her statement that 'No, I don't believe Obama is a muslim, there's no evidence to support that,' etc. paraphrased. Then Joe was on mocking her sincerity. I didn't see the segment, but heard it on radio. What I heard on the radio from HRC sounded sincere, not like she was trying to create a subliminal message as Joe suggested.

She's damned if she does and damned if she doesn't. I

[uponit7771]

7. +1

[Gothmog]

8. Donald Trump's birther claims are false

This claim is simply false https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2016/05/06/donald-trumps-ridiculous-claim-that-hillary-clinton-started-the-birther-movement/

The Pinocchio Test

There’s no evidence to support Trump’s repeated claim that Clinton “started” the birther movement and was one of the first to question Obama’s birth certificate. He could blame the actions of Clinton’s supporters during the 2008 primary or say the rumor has some Democratic roots. But there’s no evidence that she or her campaign questioned his birth certificate or his citizenship. Further, the campaign denounced isolated instances of Clinton’s staffers questioning whether Obama was Muslim.

Later in the in the same CNN interview, Wolf Blitzer asked Trump about his supporters’ anti-Semitic attacks and death threats against Julia Ioffe for her profile of Melania Trump in GQ. Trump repeatedly distanced himself from the actions of this group of supporters: “I don’t know anything about that. … I know nothing about it. … You’ll have to talk to them about it. … I don’t have a message to the fans.”

If Trump doesn’t believe in being held accountable for the actions of his supporters, perhaps he should consider the same standard for his political opponents. Glass houses, and all that.

Four Pinocchios

[bucolic_frolic]

9. Chief Birther is using Birtherism to cover up his own loyalties

He's trying to Conquer America

for his European roots and allies and himself

We're not asking, "What is he really trying to accomplish?"

[Coyotl]

12. Trump is an actor geting paid to run for President.

We will never get to see the wizard behind this curtain, and we may never know if Trump even knows who it is.
It may be the devil himself.

[SunSeeker]

10. A Republican, Andy Martin, started birtherism in 2004. Clinton had nothing to do with it.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10028163662

[barbtries]

13. omigawd

there is no low in their world. what a terrible person and a terrible campaign and millions of terrible americans who think he'd make a good choice?!

sorry, meant deplorable. the great big huge tremendous basket of deplorables - they still find a way to shock me.

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

14. I'm reminded of the comment Mary McCarthy made about Lillian Hellman

"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."