Birthers

Hillary Clinton is the Queen Birther, the mother hen of the movement. It came out of her campaign's astroturf efforts to smear Barack Obama as un-American, because her campaign manager had decided that was the way to win.

Here's the memo.

The primary astroturf outlet was Hillbuzz, "Founded and edited by Kevin DuJan while working on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008."

You can find tons of astroturf rumors there, not just birther stuff: just search for terms like "Obama gay site:hillbuzz.org", or "birth certificate site:hillbuzz.org", or other similar things. The stories are still on the internet.

Now, the Hillary campaign (of 2016) would have you believe that they employed this guy, but that he did all this research and writing on his own time, on a website named after her, without their knowledge or support. None of that time-consuming research and writing happened on the clock, no. And it's just his initiative that caused him to build a website designed to imply that there was grassroots support for her, which was a major part of her approach to not conceding the nomination during a long fight. Oh, and this astroturf site's main thrust -- questioning whether Obama was an American -- happened to be literally in line with the core strategy for discrediting Obama that her top campaign officials came up with.

Yet of course, we are going to be told that the only acceptable position is that Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with this. And that she has pneumonia, and nothing else. And that she was cleared by the FBI in its investigation of her.

UPDATE: Further confirmation from McClatchy's former editor. It's as if they think that none of us were there at the time, or won't remember how it happened -- or, in the case of Hillbuzz, can't just go look it up because it's all still there on the internet.

UPDATE: A second confirmation from a journalist that the story was pushed to them by Clinton operative Sid Blumenthal.

5 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:26 PM

    Pants on fire lies:
    http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/23/donald-trump/hillary-clinton-obama-birther-fact-check/

    But par for the course here, right?

    By the way, has Trump told even one lie? Haven't seen anything hereabouts.

    -bc

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't care what some journalist says. I can believe the evidence of my eyes, and I don't need what I can plainly see for myself ratified by some credentialed professional for it to be true. I know the truth of this matter well enough, however important it is for her team to pretend it is not true. There are a very great number of things it is so, so important to pretend are not true if you're with her, aren't there? So many places where you have to demand that the truth comply with what the politics needs, rather than what your eyes and your mind can see for themselves.

    Trump lies all the time, but it's not his lies that worry me about him. It's the things he says that he really means.

    ReplyDelete
  3. That birth certificate was faked. It does not require a records search, a computer expert, or any other specialized skill to detect it. I could show a child why it is a fake.

    And not one analysis of it has ever discussed this obvious point.
    They have gone into pixels and signatures and every other obscure and arcane methodology to debunk it and none ever see the obvious glaring problem with it.

    Pull it up and LOOK at it it- it is staring you in the face. An error so obvious it may be a deliberate slap in the face on the part of the fakers.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The thing is, it doesn't matter -- and it never did matter -- where he was born. Everyone gets hung up on his Kenyan father, but he had a mother too. She was a citizen, and through that line he is a cousin of George Washington. His mother's family has been in the country since the beginning. There's no reasonable reading on which her child lacks American heritage.

    I remember reading some technical analysis of the law as it stood at the time he was born that suggested that there was some distinction between whether the citizenship was coming from the mother or the father. But there's no way that would stand up in any court today, nor in 2008. That's exactly the kind of distinction courts have subsequently rejected as unconstitutional sex discrimination.

    Nevertheless, I do think it's interesting that we really have no legal mechanism for ensuring that Presidential candidates are actually American citizens. There are only two formal requirements for the office, and both can be established by the birth certificate. You'd think someone would have the duty of checking it -- if you wanted to hold any lesser position in the government, someone would check your credentials, and establishing your citizenship is an ordinary part of issuing a security clearance, which the President has in the highest degree. Yet no one is responsible legally for checking this, and the courts threw out challenges to Obama's position on the ticket from American citizens who sued to demand a birth certificate.

    So it's a void in the law, in a particularly sensitive place.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ymar Sakar6:58 PM

    So it's a void in the law, in a particularly sensitive place.

    Human made laws are no guarantee of righteousness.

    It is better to be judged by God's laws, divine laws, than by human ones. Natural ones are a bit neutral, they don't really care who gets judged.

    Of course, once the Left reaches a certain percentage in their strategic reserve deployment, human made laws won't even matter to them. As if they can commit crimes, everybody knows about it, but nothing happens to them.

    ReplyDelete