That is so ludicrous, Don.
Trust Joe Scarborough and Don Lemon to provide big-time traditional media cover for the latest load of bull coming from the right: in this case, that Hillary Clinton started birtherism. Donald Trump made that accusation in a tweet on Tuesday night, and by Wednesday morning, Lemon was directly
asking Clinton about it:
"People have been saying on-air here, and I've been reporting it on CNN and I've been reporting it here, that you were the person behind the whole birther thing and that the senator at the time, the President-elect, actually confronted you about that. Do you care to respond?" Lemon asked, according to audio posted by Mediaite. "Did you or your campaign start the whole birther thing? And did you have a confrontation with the President?”
“That is so—no,” Clinton responded. “That is so ludicrous, Don. You know, honestly, I just believe that—first of all, it’s totally untrue. Secondly, the President and I have never had any kind of confrontation like that."
Lemon was also following on an intense
Morning Joe discussion that concluded Clinton was indeed the source of the original birther rumors because, when asked back then if she believed Barack Obama was a Muslim, after saying "Of course not" and "There is no basis for that" and "There isn't any reason to doubt" what Obama said about his own faith and "No, there is nothing to base that on," she also said "As far as I know." Aside from the fact that the "as far as I know" came after four solid denials, that's not even a question about whether Obama was born in the United States!
Birther rumors do seem to have been circulated by embittered PUMAs (remember them? and how much they sucked?) in the waning days of the 2008 primaries, but that's a far cry from Hillary Clinton or her campaign having been responsible for them. Over the summer, when Ted Cruz made similar accusations against Clinton, his campaign pointed to a 2011 Politico story that said Clinton supporters had spread an early birther rumor. But:
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.”
Is the new standard that candidates should be held accountable for everything their supporters did in the past eight years, or is that just a rule for Hillary Clinton? Because I'd love to watch Don Lemon and Joe Scarborough get Donald Trump in an interview and start accusing him of personally having said and done even a few of the things his supporters have in the past few months alone.
