Jake Tapper has the story:
President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign today started selling “Made in the USA” t-shirts featuring images of both President Obama and the long-form birth certificate he released copies of last month.
“Wear your support for this campaign with an official Made in the USA T-shirt,” his website advertises. Donate $25 or more today and we’ll send you your limited-edition shirt.
Coffee-mugs are also available.
Okay, so the Obama camp must think the birth certificate issue helps them. I’m not sure why after the deplorable way Obama handled the whole deal.
After purposefully blocking examination of the document for two and a half years, Obama expects unanimous praise for finally producing it? Really?
Well guess what. More than a few of us think there’s something profoundly weird about the way Obama handled the issue right from the beginning, when he posted a copy of his COLB on The Daily Kos, for cripes sake.
One wonders what reporters such as Tapper would have thought if a notable Republican had done this. Wouldn’t they have found it uncommon strange that the Republican candidate was retaining lawyers and amassing affidavits rather than producing what turned out to be an easily producible document? Would they have aimed their poison pens at the people asking the questions rather than the candidate who was shiftily taking steps to avoid producing something so readily available?
As Andrew McCarthy opined after Obama finally produced the birth certificate:
… let’s not ignore that Obama did move heaven and earth. This is not just a matter of him thumbing his nose at a fringe collection of nutty “birthers.” There have been several court cases. It is flat out bizarre that one should have to be sued to compel conformance with a routine that millions of Americans comply with every day. Many of these court cases, if not all, could have been short-circuited (indeed, many of the later ones would not have been filed at all) if Obama had just produced the birth certificate. Instead, he not only refused to produce it; he and his campaign paid thousands of dollars in legal fees (in some places it is reported to be well over a million dollars) to fight the lawsuits — and Obama’s lawyers even threatened to seek disciplinary sanctions against lawyers for daring to file the lawsuits. Since Obama has been president, moreover, not just the time of courts and private lawyers has been tied up; government lawyers have had to spend their time — on the public’s dime — on this nonsense.
But we’re supposed to forget all that. “Born in the USA!” “Fight the smears!”
McCarthy writes that the only thing about the whole stinking matter that’s clear, is that Obama knows that the MSM is in his hip pocket.
That is, he knew that he would not be held to the same standard as other politicians, and that if he acted in an unreasonable manner by withholding basic, easily available information that any other person seeking the presidency would be expected — be compelled — to produce, the media would portray as weirdos those demanding the information, not Obama and his stonewalling accomplices. And he also knows that, having now finally produced the document only because the game was starting to hurt him politically, the media will not focus on how easy it would have been to produce the birth certificate three years ago, or on how much time and money has been wasted by his gamesmanship; they’ll instead portray him as beleaguered and the people who have been seeking the basic information (i.e., doing the media’s job) as discredited whackos.
…Which brings us back to Tapper:
“Remember ‘fight the smears’ from the 2008 campaign?” asked campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt. “This is the mobile version of it.”
“Fight the Smears” was an Obama campaign website from 2008 that attempted to refute untruths about the campaign, such as the claim that then-Sen. Obama was a Muslim.
Yes, I remember the farcical “Fight the Smears” website. The one that insisted that Obama barely knew Bill Ayers when we know otherwise, and had little to do with ACORN, when we know otherwise.
Thanks for reminding me.
One more thing….
That Fight the Smears post that Tapper linked to purports that Obama never practiced Islam:
“Barack Obama has never been Muslim and never practiced Islam. But rumors about his religion intended to frighten some voters persist, and they mostly return to one point of fact: his name. “Barack” is the candidate’s Kenyan father’s name; Obama’s middle name, “Hussein,” is his grandfather’s name. Obama has described his father as atheist or agnostic. His Kansan mom, whose grandparents were devout Protestants, lived a secular life. Obama’s only personal contact with Islam came as a boy when he moved to Jakarta, Indonesia, with a stepfather who mixed his Islam with Hindu and Animist traditions. In five years there, Obama attended a Roman Catholic school, then a public elementary school, where he sat through a class each week of religious studies. As an adult, Obama turned to Christianity in the late ’80s in Chicago, at Trinity United Church of Christ, where he was baptized, married‹and baptized his kids. As a new U.S. senator, Obama took his oath on the family Bible.”
Psssst, Tapper – Obama did indeed practice Islam in Indonesia as a child. It’s not exactly a secret…
In Suborned in the USA, McCarthy wrote:
In any event, the records of the Catholic school and the public school Obama attended during his last year in Indonesia identify him as a Muslim. As Obama relates in Dreams from My Father, he took Koran classes. As Obama doesn’t relate in Dreams from My Father, children in Indonesia attended religious instruction in accordance with their family’s chosen faith. Moreover, acquaintances recall that young Barry occasionally attended Friday prayers at the local mosque, and Maya Soetoro-Ng, Obama’s half-sister (born after Lolo and Ann moved the family to Jakarta), told the New York Times in a 2008 interview, “My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.” In fact, back in March 2007 — i.e., during the early “Islamic ties are good” phase of Obama’s campaign — the candidate wistfully shared with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof his memories of the muezzin’s Arabic call to prayer: “one of the prettiest sounds on earth at sunset.” Kristof marveled at the “first-rate accent” with which Obama was able to repeat its opening lines.
You want to revisit all this crap? Let’s do it. Not that it matters, but why lie about it? And why enable the lies?
The Obama Camp is up to its old dishonest tricks. Not that they have ever been anything but dishonest.
Depressingly, the MSM is still more than happy to play along.
Hat tip: Ace.
UPDATE:
I just came up with my own tee-shirt idea…who would buy one of these babies?
FRONT:
BACK:
Let me know what you think.
I’d sell it for less than the Obama campaign is asking for their dorkwad shirts, too.
UPDATE:
Jack Cashill at The American Thinker calls the pathetic cabal of lickspittles who cover American politics in the MSM these days, “anti-journalists”, in a recent piece at the American Thinker.
Unlike every other candidate in modern presidential history, Obama did not choose to share any of his essential documents, and the media happily obliged him. As Corsi details, Obama has shielded those records involved with his adoption, his kindergarten, Punahou School, Occidental College, his passport and travel, Columbia University (including his senior thesis), Harvard Law School, his medical history, his Chicago law practice, his State Senate career, as well as his SAT and LSAT scores, and, until recently, his very birth certificate.
Then, too, there is the question of Obama’s Connecticut-based Social Security number, a question that Corsi tackles, but the media inevitably dodge.
You know what’s strange? Jerome Corsi was once widely admired by Republicans for co- writing the Swift-boat tell-all that torpedoed John Kerry’s presidential campaign. He wrote the truth about Kerry’s record in Vietnam, and it was ugly. We dug him for that.
Now, Corsi is persona non grata in polite circles… nobody wants to pay attention to his years of research into Obama’s origins because suddenly it’s become uncool to do so. Because the anti-journalists, or ” journolisters” tell us so.
We know these people run cover for Obama…we know they lie….we know they would be in constant attack mode if a Republican had half of the background questions Obama has. Yet, we back off like wussies.
Linked by Michelle Malkin in Buzzworthy, thanks!
Nice Deb 