Bombshell: ‘Washington Post’ Confirms Hillary Clinton Started the Birther Movement
New analysis from the Washington Post removes any doubt that the anti-Obama Birther movement was started in 2007 and 2008 by Hillary Clinton, her campaign, and her Democrat supporters.
As Breitbart News reported earlier this month, other left-wing media outlets, like Politico and the Guardian, had already traced the Birther movement back to Democrats and Ms. Clinton. Using his wayback machine on Wednesday, the Post‘s David Weigel took an in-depth look at the origins of the false rumors that President Obama is a practicing Muslim who was not born in a America. Weigel’s reporting contains the final pieces of a very disturbing puzzle.
What Weigel found and re-reported was astounding, details many of us had forgotten or never heard of, including a 2007 bombshell memo from the Clinton campaign’s chief strategist.
What the left-wing Weigel left out of his reporting was even more astounding, including a documented confrontation between Clinton and Obama over the Birther issue, and video of Hillary herself stoking doubt about Obama’s Christian faith.
Because the Washington Post‘s primary job is to protect Democrats, Weigel’s headline and conclusion are an objective lie. Despite the fact that what he uncovered (and chose to not cover) points directly to Ms. Clinton and her campaign, Weigel concludes she had nothing to do with the Birther movement.
Naturally, Weigel’s own facts support the exact opposite conclusion.
His research, however, is all that matters.
Defcon 4: Mark Penn’s March 2007 Strategy Memo
Everything began in March of 2007 when Hillary’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, wrote a now-infamous campaign memo laying out his overall plan to win the election.
Weigel sums up the Birther elements of Penn’s memo as a nothingburger; indeed, according to Weigel, the memo actually proves that the Clinton campaign wanted nothing to do with Birtherism: “But Penn wrote that as a warning, not a strategy,” Weigel writes.
While most of Weigel’s lies in his defense of Clinton are of omission and deflection, the wrist-flicking of Penn’s memo is pure audacity.
Because this is important, I’m not asking anyone to believe my interpretation of the memo. You can read the memo for yourself here. Below are two mainstream media sources. [emphasis added] As you’ll see, the idea that the memo was a warning against “othering” Obama is preposterous:
The Atlantic:
[Penn] wrote, “I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” Penn proposed targeting Obama’s “lack of American roots.”
Bloomberg
The idea of going after Obama’s otherness dates back to the last presidential election—and to Democrats. … Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, recognized this potential vulnerability in Obama and sought to exploit it. … Penn wrote: … “[H]is roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.”
Penn also suggested how the campaign might take advantage of this. “Every speech should contain the line that you were born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century,” he advised Clinton. “And talk about the basic bargain as about [sic] the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child, and that drive you today.” He went on: “Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t … Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds [of campaign events].”
Bloomberg adds: “Penn was not a birther.”
His memo didn’t raise the issue of Obama’s citizenship. Furthermore, he was acutely aware of the political danger that a Democrat would court by going after Obama in this way, even subliminally: “We are never going to say anything about his background,” he wrote.
That is what the memo said. The truth, though, is that the attacks on Obama’s background would come the following year, and those attacks would not only come from Hillary’s supporters but directly from her own campaign and her own mouth during a nationally televised 60 Minutes interview.
In March of 2007, the campaign could afford to attack Obama’s otherness “subliminally.”
By the following year, as the primary losses mounted, the gloves came completely off.
Defcon 3: Hillary Clinton and Her Supporters Birth ‘Birtherism’
Weigel’s superb reporting uncovered how the Clinton campaign and legions of diehard Clinton supporters took Penn’s othering campaign and the questions surrounding Obama’s faith and birthplace to the next level.
It was no longer subliminal.
By now Clinton’s 2008 presidential aspirations were in serious jeopardy. Pay special attention to what Weigel writes about John Heilemann. Weigel’s lie of omission here is crucial and I’ll address it below: [emphasis added]
According to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in Game Change, the most ludicrous “othering” theory that Clinton allies engaged in was that a tape existed, somewhere, of Michelle Obama denouncing “whitey” — and that Clinton herself believed it when consigliere Sid Blumenthal talked about it.
But the Clinton campaign never pursued the idea that Obama was literally not American, and therefore ineligible for the presidency. A small group of hardcore Clinton supporters did. Specifically, anyone reading the fringe Web in the summer of 2008 could find the now-defunct blog called TexasDarlin, the now-defunct blog PUMAParty, and the now-conservative blog HillBuzz posting updates on the hunt for a birth certificate. It was a thin reed, and they knew it.
“It looks like Obama was born in Hawaii, based on a recently discovered birth announcement found in a Hawaiian newspaper,” one HillBuzz blogger wrote in July 2008. “It also looks like the reason Obama refuses to produce his actual birth certificate is that it very likely records dual Kenyan and U.S. citizenship at Obama’s birth.”
Weigel’s sleight of hand here is genius. Let’s unpack the lies of omission.
1. Weigel uses Bloomberg’s John Heilemann as a witness for the defense of Hillary but intentionally chooses not to tell his readers that a mere two days earlier, on Monday, Heilemann confirmed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that the Birther movement began with the Clinton campaign.
Again, I’m going to quote a left-wing source:
Host Joe Scarborough called Clinton’s attack on Trump “rich,” saying, “For Hillary Clinton to come out and criticize anybody for spreading the rumors about Barack Obama, when it all started … with her and her campaign passing things around in the Democratic primary[.] … This started with Hillary Clinton, and it was spread by the Clinton team in 2008.” …
Heilemann, author of the insider account of the 2008 election Game Change, said it was the case that Clinton spread the rumors. “It was the case,” he said. “I’m affirming the Scarborough-Brzezinski assertion.”
2. Weigel also chose not to report:
It was not until April 2008, at the height of the intensely bitter Democratic presidential primary process, that the touch paper was properly lit.
An anonymous email circulated by supporters of Mrs. Clinton, Mr Obama’s main rival for the party’s nomination, thrust a new allegation into the national spotlight — that he had not been born in Hawaii.
3. Pretending to be naïve, Weigel uses these third party Democrat attacks on Obama’s identity as proof! that Hillary’s hands are clean, you know, because it’s her supporters raising the conspiracy, and not Hillary.
Apparently, it’s only Republicans who are held accountable for the actions of their supporters.
Apparently, only Republicans are capable of coordinating with outside groups to do their dirty work.
Despite more smoke than you’ll find in Jeff Spicoli’s van, Weigel uses that smoke as proof that there is no fire. This isn’t journalism, it’s desperate partisan spin.
4. Weigel says nothing about the Clinton campaign’s shattering silence during this smear campaign.
5. Weigel doesn’t want his readers to know that Barack Obama himself believes Hillary Clinton started the Birther rumors, even though this fact was reported by no less than Weigel’s own employer at The Washington Post:
Obama and Clinton were both at Reagan National Airport on their way to Iowa for a [2007] debate, and the candidates met on the tarmac for what became a brief but heated conversation. Then-Obama personal aide Reggie Love witnessed the event and describes it in his new memoir:
[Obama] very respectfully told her the apology was kind, but largely meaningless, given the emails it was rumored her camp had been sending out labeling him as a Muslim. Before he could finish his sentence, she exploded on Obama. In a matter of seconds, she went from composed to furious. It had not been Obama’s intention to upset her, but he wasn’t going to play the fool either.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/09/26/washington-post-confirms-hillary-clinton-started-the-birther-movement/