-By Gary Krasner
What do you do if you wish to run for state — and later federal — office, but your college papers would reveal you to be farther to the left than you wish to appear to voters?
You do something that no other senate or presidential candidate ever did — you conceal all of it. You prohibit the colleges from releasing any of your records or writings.
Once elected, how do you keep people from focussing on those concealed papers? You dangle something else in front of them. Something simple.
Before Obama ran for any office, his book publisher asked him to change his how he refers to himself, not as Barry Obama but as Barak Obama, and to allege that he was born in Kenya. He even had his bio used by a literary agent written to say so.
For 15 years, by his own representations, Obama was not a native born citizen. That seemed like good bait to dangle in front of his political opponents.
And for 5 long years, Obama did just that. He refused to release his long form birth certificate. For years, he released various substitutes for it.
That triggered more skepticism and suspicion he was hiding something. The finally he releases it, but the birth certificate is in the wrong file format.
It’s a vector-based format, as opposed to a rasterized image. The former is a format that’s characteristic of a created document, in such an application as Adobe Illustrator.
The latter is the sort of image you would get from scanning a page. So naturally, this led his opponents to think it was fabricated.
Obama’s cynical cat and mouse game went on for years, with the liberal mainstream media aiding and abetting the allegation from his minions that this is based on racism.
After all, he’s the first black president! Except that the call for transparency was based on Obama’s secrecy and obfuscation—not his race.
Well, now Hillary — the original birther — out of nowhere, decides to raise the birther issue again, because she’s slipping in the polls.
Democrat talking points were released to all the Sunday morning network news shows, to repeat the phrase, “for 5 years”, over and over again.
They all did it. “Trump was pushing the birther allegations for 5 years”, was repeated a dozen times by every host of these mainstream media shows.
Both Kellyanne Conway and running mate Mike Pence were repeatedly hammered with the “for 5 years” phrase on the shows.
The phrase is beautifully constructed to make it sound like Trump was on the birther issue 24/7, 365 days for 5 years.
In fact, Trump would appear on shows to mention it on occasion, and ask sincere questions of Obama. But Obama stiff-armed the public for 5 years.
And for years, conservatives were branded as racists, as Trump is now, and no media was focussed on Obama’s college papers, nor how he received an out-of-sequence social security number.
Obama played rope-a-dope with conservatives, and it’s working out nice for Hillary today. Neither Conway nor Pence knew how to get off script on Sunday.
They could have called out the hosts for reading the Democrat “for 5 years” talking point. They could have alluded to Obama’s cynical rope-a-dope tactic of covering up his past.
They didn’t. This is how Democrats win. They’re very adept at twisting facts and manipulating the gullible public, with the aid of their allies in the media.
For years, we’ve had a do-nothing Republican leadership. We never saw John Boehner or Mitch McConnell explain supply side economics at their press conference, or explain the folly of raising minimum wage, or put up a logical argument on stopping Obamacare.
We never saw any Republican leader use his bully pulpit to educate the voter about basic principals of conservative policies. All we got from them was meaningless political blather.
And when I see Conway or Pence struggle with this birther business again, I see the same fools we’ve had for over 20 years, unable to cut through the most transparent rhetorical tricks these Democrats conjure.
Nothing makes me more sick than this incompetence.