Friday Fun Day - time to laugh at Conservative dishonesty, BUSTED by Factcheck.org

Trump eats crow

In this morning's Factcheck.org feed, to which I subscribe, was this about Trump's (and in his condidacy day's Cruz's) claim that Hillary Clinton was a birther.

She wasn't, and Factcheck.org documents that very well, as far back as July 2015.

Everything old is new again.  I can rely on my friend Mitch Berg, over at SitD, to demonstrate almost daily everything wrong about blogging and the right wing; specifically I can rely on him to remind me of everything I DON'T want to be as a blogger. I can also count on him to repeat every vile attack and factually false claim made by the right without substantive fact checking.

That only works where you have fact-averse conservatives who are more interested in having their prejudices stroked than in factual accuracy.  Mitch can safely rely on his many radical right wing readers to avoid fact checking as personally painful.

What makes this fun for Friday material is that Mitch yesterday quoted Factcheck.org, without a link of course, to support the current Trump claim that Hillary was the original birther.  She was not.  Here is the most recent ACTUAL Facthcheckc.org research on claims that Hillary Clinton was ever a birther.

Was Hillary Clinton the Original ‘Birther’?

Two Republican presidential candidates claim the so-called “birther” mhttps://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=6337568240689378702#editor/target=post;postID=782530987619291560ovement originated with the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008. While it’s true that some of her ardent supporters pushed the theory, there is no evidence that Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with it.
In an interview on June 29, Sen. Ted Cruz said “the whole birther thing was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008,” and earlier this year, Donald Trump claimed “Hillary Clinton wanted [Obama’s] birth certificate. Hillary is a birther.”
Neither Cruz nor Trump presented any evidence that Clinton or anyone on her campaign ever questioned Obama’s birthplace, demanded to see his birth certificate, or otherwise suggested that Obama was not a “natural born citizen” eligible to serve as president.
For those unfamiliar with the controversy over Obama’s birthplace, it refers to those who contend that Obama was born in Kenya and ineligible to be president.
At FactCheck.org, we have written about the issue of Obama’s birthplace on multiple occasions — indeed we were the first media organization to hold his birth certificate in our hot little hands and vouch for the authenticity of it. But facts have done little to squelch the conspiracy theories that continue to bounce around online.
(quoting Ted Cruz)
“It’s interesting, the whole birther thing was started by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 against Barack Obama,” Cruz said (at about the 25:25 mark). Cruz then went on to say that he believes he clearly meets the constitutional requirement for a president to be a “natural born citizen.”
The claim about Clinton’s tie to “birthers” was made earlier by Donald Trump in February at the CPAC event (at 24:20 mark). Trump — who has a history of pushing bogus theories about Obama’s birth —  said, “Hillary Clinton wanted [Obama’s] birth certificate. Hillary is a birther. She wanted … but she was unable to get it.”
According to the [Politico April 22, 2011] article, the theory that Obama was born in Kenya “first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama’s citizenship.”
The second article, which ran several days after the Politico piece, was published by the Telegraph, a British paper, which stated: “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.”
Both of those stories comport with what we here at FactCheck.org wrote two-and-a-half years earlier, on Nov. 8, 2008: “This claim was first advanced by diehard Hillary Clinton supporters as her campaign for the party’s nomination faded, and has enjoyed a revival among John McCain’s partisans as he fell substantially behind Obama in public opinion polls.”
Both of those stories comport with what we here at FactCheck.org wrote two-and-a-half years earlier, on Nov. 8, 2008: “This claim was first advanced by diehard Hillary Clinton supporters as her campaign for the party’s nomination faded, and has enjoyed a revival among John McCain’s partisans as he fell substantially behind Obama in public opinion polls.”
Claims about Obama’s birthplace appeared in chain emails bouncing around the Web, and one of the first lawsuits over Obama’s birth certificate was filed by Philip Berg, a former deputy Pennsylvania attorney general and a self-described “moderate to liberal” who supported Clinton.
But none of those stories suggests any link between the Clinton campaign, let alone Clinton herself, and the advocacy of theories questioning Obama’s birth in Hawaii.
One of the authors of the Politico story, Byron Tau, now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, told FactCheck.org via email that “we never found any links between the Clinton campaign and the rumors in 2008.”
The other coauthor of the Politico story, Ben Smith, now the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed, said in a May 2013 interview on MSNBC that the conspiracy theories traced back to “some of [Hillary Clinton’s] passionate supporters,” during the final throes of Clinton’s 2008 campaign. But he said they did not come from “Clinton herself or her staff.”
Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said Cruz’s claim is false. “The Clinton campaign never suggested that President Obama was not born here,” Schwerin wrote to us in an email.
It is certainly interesting, and perhaps historically and politically relevant, that “birther” advocacy may have originated with supporters of Hillary Clinton — especially since many view it as an exclusively right-wing movement. But whether those theories were advocated by Clinton and/or her campaign or simply by Clinton “supporters” is an important distinction. Candidates are expected to be held accountable for the actions of their campaigns. Neither Cruz nor Trump, whose campaign did not respond to our request for backup material, provides any compelling evidence that either Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with starting the so-called birther movement.

— Robert Farley

Now over at SitD, Mitch cites the disreputable and unreliable, not credible source of Breitbart which is no more news than Fakes TV, claiming a Clinton campaign exec plotted the birtherism controversy.

NOT TRUE.  And the birther movement is nothing if not the definition of 'negative'.

As covered by a different entry from Factcheck.org that came out this afternoon specifically faulting Trump as a liar noted:

Trump on Birtherism: Wrong, and Wrong

On March 19, 2007, then Clinton adviser Mark Penn wrote a strategy memo to Clinton that identified Obama’s “lack of American roots” as something that “could hold him back.” That memo, which was part of campaign documents featured in a September 2008 article in The Atlantic, cited Obama’s “boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii” as life experiences that made his “basic American values … at best limited.” But Penn’s memo did not question Obama’s birthplace or his birth certificate. It advised Clinton to contrast her life experiences in middle America “without turning negative.”
“We are never going to say anything about his background,” Penn wrote.
Again, if there is evidence that Clinton or her campaign had something to do with the origins of the so-called birther movement, we’ve yet to see it. And Trump has never offered any proof.

Shame shame shame on the right, including local bloggers,  for trying to excuse their nominee by trying to tar someone else with his lies.  I can only speculate how many of his supporters who still believe this rubbish - because so many conservatives of the ilk who support Trump, the deplorables, DO believe lies like this - will now be discontented with their evil candidate.

Bur dishonesty is the only alternative when facts are consistently not on your side.