Posted on 04/24/2011 12:28:36 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Ever want to reach through your TV screen and grab somebody and scream at him? When Michele Bachmann admitted that the document George Stephanopoulos was showing her was the President’s birth certificate, and then said that the President should just release it, I wanted to throttle George. The proper response was “He did, three years ago.”
Donald Trump’s grandstanding about the birther issue has forced mainstream Republicans to face the conspiracy theory or be branded idiots like Trump. With two-thirds of their base believing that the President was not born in Hawaii, and even fewer understanding that it really doesn’t matter where he was born because his mother was an American who never gave up her citizenship or entered another country as an immigrant, they are stuck between playing to their base or playing to the greater population of the nation. Poor babies. This is what you get for thinking you can control the lunacy instead of just riding it to the polls for one election.
What Trump has exposed is the stupidity of the birther argument. Trump made a big show of releasing his “long form” birth certificate – the one that the hospital sent to the Department of Health – only to be told that it is not a legal document. He then had to produce the New York State “certificate of live birth” – the very document that the birthers claim is not proof of President Obama’s birth. He challenged the newspaper reports of the President’s birth, claiming first that his parents were too poor to place notices in the newspapers, then claiming that the President’s maternal grandparents placed the notices. He was confronted by the fact that the newspaper notices state that the information had been provided by the Hawaii Health Department and were not paid announcements. Then he claimed no one remembered the President as a child or remembered his parents in Hawaii. Sorry – Gov. Neil Abercrombie knew them at school and there are plenty of photos of the President when he was in school. Then he quoted the truncated phone call where the translator was cut off trying to correct the mistaken impression that the President’s step-grandmother had said he was born in Kenya. The full phone call was played on loads of television shows.
Donald Trump has forced the mainstream media and even Fox News in the person of Bill O’Reilly to confront the lie bit by bit, layer by layer and refute it. He has done more to discredit the Orly Taitz crowd than anyone else has done in the past three years. The President took the attitude that all he had to do was release his certificate of live birth and just ignore the situation. Donald Trump, in insisting that the President was not born in Kenya, has finally forced the media to do what they should have done all along – stand up with the facts.
Each time a journalist or commentator confronts a Republican candidate or politician on this issue, they are helping to sort the wheat from the chaff. Only those candidates who are willing to stand up to the lies will advance to the next level. No Republican can win with just the base vote. They need to get the votes of the people who don’t believe the lies. Being wishwashy or hedging their bets with “I’ll take him at his word” just aren’t cutting it. Unless a journalist or interviewer doesn’t follow through the way Stephanopoulos didn’t.
These are the days when I miss Mike Wallace and Edward R. Murrow. They knew how to go in for the final word. They knew that the follow-up is often more important than the original question. Too many of today’s journalists just fell into the field with no training and even less vocation.
ping
She’s no idiot. You don’t become a city councilwoman, mayor, energy commission chair, governor and major party vice presidential candidate by being stupid. If the media/academia/Hollywood/intelligentsia/Broadway/nutroots can do that to her, they could do it to the next Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln or Calvin Coolidge.
She’s no idiot. You don’t become a city councilwoman, mayor, energy commission chair, governor and major party vice presidential candidate by being stupid. If the media/academia/Hollywood/intelligentsia/Broadway/nutroots can do that to her, they could do it to the next Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln or Calvin Coolidge.
I meant no disrespect to Sarah Palin. I just think the media has begun to sling mud at him the way they did her. He is just lucky that we already know a lot about him and are more aware of the lies the media spreads. Sarah was a newcomer to everyone not from Alaska. Some (tea party) gave her the benefit of a doubt but many did not.
She’s no idiot. You don’t become a city councilwoman, mayor, energy commission chair, governor and major party vice presidential candidate by being stupid. If the media/academia/Hollywood/intelligentsia/Broadway/nutroots can do that to her, they could do it to the next Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln or Calvin Coolidge.
I meant no disrespect to Sarah Palin. I just think the media has begun to sling mud at him the way they did her. He is just lucky that we already know a lot about him and are more aware of the lies the media spreads. Sarah was a newcomer to everyone not from Alaska. Some (tea party) gave her the benefit of a doubt but many did not.
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