Why is Trump lying about Obama?
Donald Trump wants to see President Obama’s birth certificate.
What, he can’t afford a computer?
The president’s birth certificate has been available online for years.
Trump’s resurrection of this “Birther” nonsense obviously appeals to the knuckle-dragger wing of the Republican Party. He’s currently tied for second place (at 17%) with Mike Huckabee (another Obama history reviser) among potential Republican presidential candidates.
Trump has been making the talk show rounds slinging a number of freshly repackaged myths about Obama’s past.
As soon as he drops another already refuted non-bombshell, fact-checkers pounce.
When Trump addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference back in February, he was sending the message that he’s considering a run for the presidency.
He got a big cheer when he announced that Obama “came out of nowhere.” He could have left it at that for some of the people in the room. They think he’s a visitor from Mars.
But Trump added “The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.”
That claim has been around for a couple of years. It’s been debunked ever since.
Obama went to a half dozen schools since he was 6 years old. There are a number of newspaper and magazine articles – and books that quote his classmates through the years.
What, Trump can’t read?
There’s the well-researched fiction advanced by Trump that Obama’s “grandmother in Kenya said he was born in Kenya and she was there and witnessed the birth.”
PolitiFact.com rates Trump’s statement “False.”
There is a readily available taped interview, in which Obama’s grandmother clearly states her grandson was born in America; more specifically Hawaii – and even more specifically she wasn’t there when he was born.
You can hear the entire 14 minute interview online if you’d like.
What, Trump can’t hear either?
He’s better at drumming up attention for himself, than he is at appearing presidential.
Since he’s landed in “Birtherville,” Trump’s NBC show “The Apprentice” has enjoyed a steady rise in the ratings.
But it’s hard taking him seriously as a presidential candidate – unless you think that asking questions that have already been answered is a winning strategy.
With every new talk show appearance, Trump claims he’s “investigating” Obama’s true birthplace.
With Trump’s rise in the polls, and his penchant for excavating non-issues, it caused NBC’s national investigative correspondent, Michael Isikoff, to revisit the birth certificate question.
Isikoff’s conclusion? He got the same answers everybody else got years ago, except for one big exception.
Isikoff spoke to Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the ex-director of Hawaii’s Department of Health, who used the word “ludicrous,” as in, “It’s kind of ludicrous at this point,” regarding new questions about Obama’s birth certificate.
In Hawaii, the certificate of live birth is the legal birth certificate. That’s the document everybody (including “Birthers”) has seen since before the 2008 presidential election.
What “Birther” Trump fails to understand when he backtracks to 2008 conspiracies, is that he’s in league with racists and flakes – not the American public at large.
Even if the president himself requested a copy of the birth record known as the “long form” – existing law in Hawaii prohibits him from having a copy of it.
It belongs to a repository of vital statistics housed on the first floor of the Department of Health building. They’re not part of any public record.
When Trump and his “Birther” buddies claim the president could easily “put the matter of his birth place to rest,” they should know that the certificate of live birth is all the president can legally produce in the first place.
The record is clear. Barack Hussein Obama II, was born in a hospital in Honolulu, Hawaii, on Aug. 4, 1961 at 7:24 P.M.
Trump, is, if nothing else, a showman.
He’s a carnival barker who’s turning American politics into a sideshow.
He’s not really concerned about the birth of Barack Obama. It’s the births of the suckers he’s cares about. The ones who’ll support him, because he – like any showman – believes there’s one born every minute.
Edward A. Owens is a three-time Emmy Award winner and 20-year veteran of television news. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net
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