Desperate and Reeling, Once Again The Clinton Campaign Reach for “Birtherism”… (like they did in 2008 when they started it)

by Scott Creighton

In the wake of Donald Trump’s recent rising tide at the polls and more importantly, Hillary Clinton’s slide, the Clinton advocates have resorted to a tactic they used 8 years ago but this time with a slightly different twist. It’s still a variation on race baiting, which is pretty the lowest form of campaign re-balancing acts any staff weasel has ever come up with. It reeks of desperation and like that of death, it’s a stench registered independent voters are sure to notice.

You have to be living under a rock these days if you don’t know Hillary Clinton’s comfortable lead from a month ago has slipped from her clutches. The trends are pretty staggering considering who she’s running against and everyone from AlterNet , to the Atlantic to Fox News is reporting on it. This is especially true in the battleground states and as of 6 days ago, Trump was even making up ground among Hispanics and African Americans, two demographics that the Clinton people thought would be theirs no matter what she did.

What we are seeing is a sort of repeat of the 2007/2008 campaign of Hillary Clinton when she was running against a little known senator from Illinois, Barack Obama. Toward the end, he started surging as well and Hillary and her supporters became desperate.

What resorted from that state of panic, without any debate, was the birth of “Birtherism”

What I mean by “without any debate” is that there is no debate: Clinton supporters started “Birtherism” as a reaction to their candidate becoming desperate in the 2008 Democratic Party Presidential Nominee contest. That’s a fact. It started in an email chain and no one really knows the original source which means it could have easily started in her campaign offices. We don’t know.

“That theory first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama’s citizenship.

“Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth,” asserted one chain email that surfaced on the urban legend site Snopes.com in April 2008.” Politico, April 2011

As the story goes, this email was never tracked back to one single primary source so no one really knows who started the “Birther” thing but a former Clinton volunteer at the time, Linda Starr (or Linda Sue Belcher) ended up taking credit for it later.

“John Avlon, editor-in-chief of the Daily Beast, explored the roots of the birther movement in his book  Wingnuts: How the Lunatic Fringe Is Hijacking America. Avlon described a posting on the PUMA website with the heading “Obama May Be Illegal to Be Elected President!” He wrote that a Clinton volunteer in Texas, Linda Starr, played a key role in spreading the rumor.” Politifact

Once Clinton was defeated and she finally endorsed Barack Obama, a group of angry women Clinton supporters decided they were never going to vote for the Democratic Party candidate. They became known as the PUMAs and according to reports, they continued to push the “Birther” thing on their website hoping they could get Barack disqualified. They also became known as Democrats for McCain which is yet another odd similarity between these two elections as we now have Republicans for Hillary and 48% of Sanders supporters refusing to support the party nominee.

Linda Starr hooked up with a lawyer named Phil Berg who had previously made a name for himself by doing things like filing suit against three Supreme Court justices for interfering in the 2000 Presidential Election recount and against George W. Bush for 9/11. Berg was “all in” on the “Birther” thing and he and Starr did what they could to take it to the next level.

In the end, Berg ended up suing Starr and he lost his license to practice law and as of 2009, from reports I read, he was driving a cab or something like that. Starr faded away as well.

All that said, it’s not like the “Birther” thing was without basis. Sometime during the early stages of the 2008 Republican campaign, I think it was John McCain when asked about the possibility of running against Obama said something like “Oh I don’t worry about him. We got something on him that will end his candidacy in an instant. I hope he becomes the candidate” or something to that effect.

And another issue came to light some time later which was falsely reported as coming from the Harvard yearbook when it fact it came from a publisher who represented young Barack Obama back in 1991:

I can only imagine that the authors they represented had to approve of the bios they did for them, but again, that was never made clear. If anything, this little clip of a biography shows that there have always been a number of stories relating to his background but perhaps not coincidentally, it confirms at least part of the “Birther” narrative, that he was in fact born in Kenya and then raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.

Personally I find his connections to Business International Corporation more troubling than his place of origin. BIS is well understood to be linked to the CIA (if not owned by them) and they have a history of helping to overthrow countries across the world. For that matter, Obama’s mother worked for USAID in Indonesia under the brutal dictatorship of Suharto giving out “microloans” to citizens who snitched on their neighbors so they could build lists of dissidents to round up to give to the dictator (who Obama’s step father worked for). USAID is also heavily involved with the CIA.

And let me get this straight right off the bat: I do not know where he was born but if I had to choose one way or the other I would say Barack’s mother and father flew to Kenya to meet the family and spend time with them before the birth of their child and they accidentally remained in country past the point where the airline would allow her to fly back. They did that because they didn’t want children to be born mid-flight. That said, that does not make Barack Obama a Kenyan. Under such circumstances I believe the child born to a citizen of the States is definitely a citizen. There are much better cases to be made about Ted Cruz’s right to run for president than there are for Obama’s, that’s for sure.

However you wish to look at it, Donald Trump was NOT the leader of the “Birther” movement. And he certainly did not start it. Berg, Starr and a number of others (like Di$info Jone$ for instance) wear those crowns. And ultimately, no one knows who REALLY started that first email chain sent out to Clinton supporters. For all we know, it could have come from her office.

If you wish to be painfully honest about it, “Birtherism’s” roots are firmly planted in Hillary Clinton’s quest to become president back in 2008, a quest she pursued with vicious intent (she did insinuate he “might be” a secret Muslim at one point)

Not surprisingly, right now, at this tipping point in Hillary’s failing campaign, a Clinton surrogate working for the Washington Post (Robert Costa) decided to ambush Donald Trump yesterday with a question about “Birtherism” thus allowing for the Clinton apologists to harp on that response all day today as opposed to say talking about the new Wikileaks release of more hacked DNC emails which prove a “pay to play” mentality in the unDemocratic Party.

Once again we have the Democrats sinking to the basest form of political discourse possible, race-baiting, in order to attempt to control the emergency descent of their crashing campaign and once again it appears their efforts depend entirely on them considering their target audience to be too ignorant to remember WHERE IT ALL FUCKING STARTED!

You might think at a time like this the LAST THING Clinton staffers would want to do would be to remind their base of support about the “Birther” smear campaign that got it’s start from Clinton volunteers and the PUMA Clintonites.

You might think that, but you would be wrong.

Everyone talks about how Trump keeps shooting himself in the foot and yes, he has had a tendency to do that, but nothing like this. I even saw Mika “Tongue Up Hillary’s Butt” Brzezinski having to admit on Morning Joe today that it all started with Hillary’s previous flailing campaign in 2008 and trust me when I say this, that smug self-satisfied patented look on her face was no where to be seen while she was doing it.

How stupid do you have to be?

Yes, getting a candidate to roll-back a previously stated position is damaging to their base but honestly, is the net profit from that petty little act worth having African Americans remember Hillary’s people were the first in the national spotlight to suggest Barack was a “secret Muslim” and not qualified to run for the office of President… BECAUSE HE WAS AFRICAN!?

I doubt it.

But they don’t factor in the metrics of the information age I guess or maybe her peeps are stuck in the beeper-age… I don’t know.

Or maybe they’re just desperately clutching at the crumbling soil at the top of the hole they’ve dug for themselves with their lying, war-mongering, corrupt and RACE BAITING candidate as they slide into the shameful abyss of being the “qualified” candidate who ends up losing to The Donald and his Combover of Victory.

Whatever it is, the stench of decay is permeating the Clinton campaign at this point and perhaps it’s time for them to call in Rev. Al to administer the last rights.