There is no doubt that when Donald Trump decided to blame Hillary Clinton for starting the birther controversy, given the fact that all of his surrogates were spending Sunday morning trying to validate their accusations, they were working a little harder than usual to make it true.
The Inquisitr wrote about three of them , one of them being Alex Castellanos, who is usually on Meet The Press every Sunday to attack Hillary Clinton and defend Donald Trump no matter what.
As seen in the video, before Alex Castellanos goes in to defend the claims that Hillary Clinton started the birther controversy, he hints at the small issues that the American people are not interested in, but when he does defend it, he’s already prepared to quote from the memo emailed by Mark Penn.
When the other pundit Cornel Belcher says that the birther claim was news to him, Alex Castellanos goes in for the attack and is already defensive as if to say that Belcher was lying when he says “oh, give me a break,” and then reads the quote.
“I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war, who is not at his center, fundamentally American in his thinking and values.”
It’s time to Meet the Press pic.twitter.com/ecMhLk1HDh
— Cornell Belcher (@cornellbelcher) September 18, 2016
In the argument, when Cornel Belcher says that it never came from Hillary’s mouth, Castellanos goes in again and says, “no, just her strategist.”
But Snopes, which is a 21-year old site that covers these types of myths, tracks the Castellanos’ implication of Obama’s otherness to other conservative sources and offers links to those sources and quotes to show that what Castellanos used to arm himself against Cornel was not well-researched at all.
The article points to PR NewsWire which documented the original press release about the president’s “otherness” when it was made in 2004 by Andy Martin who was a registered Democrat until 1986, before he became a Republican and had been one for almost two decades before he started accusing the president of lying to the American people about his heritage.
While Hillary Clinton’s strategist Mark Penn would be sending the memo around to campaign staffers four years later, Andy Martin was calling for Crown Books to stop the sales of Obama’s book Dreams From My Father for “fraudulent” content and being a threat to the Jewish community.
He would also file a lawsuit against the state of Hawaii to release Obama’s birth certificate when the issue came up again in 2008.
Prior to this, the article says that it would be yet another conservative columnist, Debbie Schlussel, who would stir up Obama’s otherness in 2006, with an article called “Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim.”
Right Wing Hate: Debbie Schlussel Attacks “Michelle Hussein Obama” as Classless via The … https://t.co/R21c7MQFys
— Island Girl – 100% Pro-Choice, Vote Blue in 2022 (@bluepolitics_) March 6, 2016
Neither Alex Castellanos, Mike Pence or Kellyanne Conway mentioned any of this when they were busy defending Donald Trump on the Sunday morning round-up news programs on September 18. Really, they lean on Mark Penn most of the time and had occasionally thrown in the name of Sydney Blumenthal to show that they were attempting to conduct an investigation with McClatchy News to see if they could investigate further as to whether Barack Obama was born in Kenya or not.
One article by neoconservative opinion news service The Weekly Standard attempts to discredit Blumenthal because of his role in the Clinton campaign and spends very few words on talking about his involvement with emailing the conspiracy.
Donald Trump’s surrogates treat everything prior to March 2008, just as they do the five years that he spent trying to pitch to the American people that Obama was not born in the United States as if it never happened.
What should be clear is that during the 2008 election year with the first potential black president of the United States, the politics were ugly. One article by Talking Points Memo talks about Pennsylvania’s former deputy attorney general Philip J. Berg, a Democrat, who was committed to the birther conspiracy in 2008 and is still committed to it to this very day because it seems to sell his books.
But the article also points out clearly what happened to everyone who was spreading that rumor in the Clinton campaign, so really, the truth here is that she stopped it rather than started it.
“Clinton has flatly rejected conspiracies about Obama’s birthplace, and did not accept the advice of then-campaign strategist Mark Penn to highlight her opponent’s upbringing abroad and “limited” relationship with American values. Penn was fired in 2008, and the Clinton campaign also dismissed two 2008 Iowa volunteers, Judy Rose and Linda Olson, who shared emails claiming that Obama was secretly a Muslim.”
It should be clear at this point that the beginnings of the birther movement were much earlier than Mark Penn and that again, those in the Hillary campaign who were spreading the rumor were immediately dealt with. But as for those prior to 2008 and after, they had no one to cut them lose and so they contributed greatly to the conspiracy just as Alex Castellanos, Kellyanne Conway and now Mike Pence are doing now.
[Featured Image by Jim Cole/AP Images]