Another journalist –the second one in two days — came out Saturday to confess that Sid Blumenthal aggressively shopped the rumor to him in 2008 about then-Senator Barack Obama being born in Kenya. Meanwhile, former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau spent some time on Twitter today trying to stamp out the new narrative.
That Jon Favreau is a funny guy. A wordsmith who, it turns out, is also a jokesmith.
Here he is, for instance, yucking it up with a Hillary Clinton cut-out at a party after the 2008 election:
Funny stuff. That’s Favreau on the left by the way — years before the GOP #WarOnWomen, so no harm, no foul.
Favreau’s rakish sense of humor made another appearance last May on the Charlie Rose show when he, along with two other former Obama speechwriters, Jon Lovett and David Litt, were on the PBS program to gush about Obama and the art of speechwriting. When the subject of Obama’s infamous, oft-repeated false health-care promise came up, they all had a good laugh at the taxpayers’ expense.
“Lovett wrote the line about, ‘If you like your insurance, you can keep it,’” Favreau grinned with a gleam in his eye. “How dare you!” Lovett responded, as the room erupted with laughter.
https://youtu.be/Pkqn6wsrUfs
Over five million individual health plan holders lost their insurance in the fall of 2013 after Obama promised they wouldn’t. Tens of millions more have been clobbered with skyrocketing premiums. Six and a half years after the unpopular law passed and three years after it was launched, it remains unpopular. The RCP polling average shows only 39.2 percent of the American people like ObamaCare and 48.8 percent are against it.
But it’s pretty funny how Team Obama pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes, I guess. Like they did with “shovel ready jobs” (#LOL), “an anti-Mohammed YouTube video caused the Benghazi attack” (#ROTFL), “ISIS is the jayvee team” (#LMAO), and so many other witty whoppers over the years.
You would think a guy with Jon Favreau’s particular talents would be able to recognize a lie when he saw one, but when he saw former press secretary for George W. Bush Ari Fleischer tweet that Hillary Clinton ought to apologize to Obama because her 2008 campaign was the originator of “birther” theories, he was indignant. How dare Ari Fleischer say such a thing. Why, that’s a shameful, disgusting lie!
Via Twitchy:
.@AriFleischer you're lying, Ari – and you're smart enough to know you're lying, which makes it even worse.
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) September 16, 2016
.@AriFleischer you're lying, and you know it, and it's disgusting.
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) September 16, 2016
As PJ Media reported Friday, a McClatchy Washington Bureau chief claimed Sid Blumenthal shopped that rumor to him in 2008. Another (former) Clinton loyalist in the media made the same claim on Saturday but with much more juicy detail.
In “Confessions of a Hillary Insider,” Larry Johnson of No Quarter said that he is “shocked at the audacity of Hillary Clinton to decry Donald Trump as a birther because her campaign not only pushed that item in a bid to discredit Barack Obama, but mounted a sustained campaign attack Obama on a broad array of issues.”
How do I know? I was part of that effort and was in regular email and phone coordination with Sidney Blumenthal. Sidney was the conduit who fed damaging material to me that I subsequently posted on my blog.
In some cases Sid Blumenthal actually provided a draft piece that I would slightly modify and publish under my name. Most of the time, however, Sid provided background information and researched material that I would use to craft pieces. How many? I am providing the links to 63 blog articles that I posted (and in one case was posted by Susan Hudgens, who assisted with the blog) between January 2008 and June 30, 2008.
Here is simple summary of material (in writing or through a verbal briefing) that I received from Sid?
- Information surrounding the corrupt business relationship between Barack Obama and Tony Rezko.
- Information about Barack Obama’s ties to Palestinian radicals.
- Information concerning Barack Obama’s longstanding ties to the American terrorist, Bill Ayers.
- Information concerning Barack Obama’s close ties to radical clerics–i.e., Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger.
- Information concerning allegations that Barack Obama was not a natural born citizen.
- Information concerning Barack Obama being adopted by Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro.
The big Kahuna of the anti-Obama dump was the allegation that Republicans had a tape of Michelle Obama in which she used the disparaging term “Whitey.” I published that after being told about the “tape” by Sid Blumenthal. (I learned a few weeks later that the story of the tape actually originated with Media Matter’s David Brock and he confirmed its existence to me in person).
Johnson continues:
Listening to Hillary Clinton cry crocodile tears over Trump’s questioning Obama’s birth place and eligibility to be President in 2011 as a “racist” attack is the ultimate example that Hillary is cynical and dishonest. Yes, it is true that the words, “Obama is a muslim” or “Obama is not a natural born American” never passed her lips. But it is also true that that people very close to her, such as Sidney Blumenthal, were pushing those stories and trying desperately to promote those memes.
Hillary knew about all of these lines of attack on Obama. In fact I was told by Sid on one occasion in the summer of 2008 that the Big Dog (Bill of course) was very pleased with the pieces going up at NoQuarterUSA and thought they were helping Hillary.
Blumenthal denies it all, of course:
Statement from Sid Blumenthal to @foxnews, denies starting #Birther rumor. pic.twitter.com/EugA5QsKIZ
— Jennifer Griffin (@JenGriffinFNC) September 17, 2016
Whom to believe? The two journos who are finally willing after eight years to speak out about this, or Sid Blumenthal, David (Bouffant) Brock, and of course Jon Favreau, who is still splitting a gut over the “you can keep your plan” Obamacare lie?
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