No, mainstream media, Trump didn’t start the Obama ‘birther’ movement, Hillary Clinton did

Over the weekend the Left-wing newspaper that covers Congress, The Hill, reported that President Obama was just itching for a fight with GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump.

Reading the story it was difficult to figure out if it had been written by an actual news reporter named Jordan Fabian or an operative from the Democratic Party with the same name.

The piece started out thusly:

President Obama can’t wait to take on Donald Trump.

Obama has been largely sidelined in the presidential contest, a last-year officeholder with high approval ratings who has repeatedly shown he likes to spar with political foes.

Since when is mid-40s “high approval ratings?

Anyway, you get the tone of the piece right away: Our hero president is eager – eager mind you – to take on the political neophyte and bombastic lout Trump, best him as no one has thus far and vanquish him to the ash heap of political history so that the anointed one, Madam Hillary Clinton, can breeze into her rightful place in the Oval Office for what will be Obama’s third term.

Never mind that Obama was much more of a neophyte that Trump prior to winning his first term – The Donald has some international business and political experience, having had to negotiate terms for his real estate brand – and Obama was hubristic and arrogant in his own right.

However, the biggest blunder by Fabian and The Hill was the oft-repeated lie that Trump was the original Obama “birther:”

But the president has long shown a personal disdain for Trump, dating back to when the business mogul became a leader of the “birther” movement that questioned whether Obama was born in the United States.

Nothing could be further from the truth. If Obama was being honest his ire over this birther thing should be directed at the Democratic presidential frontrunner, not the GOP leader.

As reported by Breitbart News and, in a backhanded way confirmed by Washington Post liberal Dave Weigel, the birther movement was born of Clinton’s failed 2008 Democratic presidential bid, when Obama was the political outsider and she was expecting, as now, to become her party’s nominee via coronation. In fact, the most desperate the Clinton campaign became, the more it began to cast doubt on Obama’s religious affiliations and his place of origin.

Beginning with a photo showing Obama garbed in Islamic headdress during a trip to Africa through a series of statements and insinuations, it becomes obvious that Hillary Clinton is the grandmother of the Obama birther movement.

At the time, Obama’s campaign adviser, David Plouffe, said, with subsequent reporting by the very Left-wing Guardian newspaper:

“[This is] the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election.” Obama has had to spend much of the campaign stressing he is a Christian not a Muslim and did not study at a madrassa.

The Clinton team denied it had anything to do with the distribution of the photo, but in a rare movement of honesty, Politico subsequently reported:

Where did this idea come from? Who started it? And is there a grain of truth there?

The answer lies in Democratic, not Republican politics, and in the bitter, exhausting spring of 2008. At the time, the Democratic presidential primary was slipping away from Hillary Clinton and some of her most passionate supporters grasped for something, anything that would deal a final reversal to Barack Obama.

Further, Politico reported:

The original smear against Obama was that he was a crypto-Muslim, floated in 2004 by perennial Illinois political candidate and serial litigant Andy Martin. Other related versions of this theory alleged that Obama was educated in an Indonesian “madrassa” or steeped in Islamist ideology from a young age, and the theories began to spread virally after Obama appeared on the national stage – to the casual observer, from nowhere – with his early 2007 presidential campaign. …

Then, as Obama marched toward the presidency, a new suggestion emerged: That he was not eligible to serve.

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.

There is a much more extension correction of the latest “Trump started the birther movement” lie here, also from Breitbart, but the point is clear and there is no refuting it, despite the howling from the Left: Clinton owns the Obama “birther” movement lock, stock and barrel, not the current GOP frontrunner.