Brian McNicoll’s Nov. 22 Accuracy in Media column is a rebuttal to an Atlantic piece by Adam Serwer arguing that people who voted for President Trump were motivated in part by racism. McNicoll complains at one point:
Birtherism, Serwer contended, “is rightly remembered as a racist conspiracy theory, born of an inability to accept the legitimacy of the first black president.” Actually, it was an effort by the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008 to find a way to delegitimize Obama in the Democrat primaries.
If the rules didn’t prevent someone born in Kenya from serving as president, we never would have heard a word about where Obama was born, and nobody would have cared that he played cat and mouse about the subject for a decade before presenting something he claimed to be his birth certificate but which is not.
1) There was no “effort” by the Clinton campaign to question Obama’s birthplace — that was the doing of right-wing outlets like WorldNetDaily … and AIM.
2) The “certification of live birth” Obama released in 2008 is legally equivalent to a birth certificate, making McNicoll’s complaint moot. He failed to mention that Obama did, in fact, release his birth certificate as well.
3) Obama was not born in Kenya. McNicoll offers no evidence to prove he was.
Good to see that McNicoll is coming closer to filling the conspiratorial void at AIM left by the departure of Cliff Kincaid.