Thread: Rep. Cantor blasts Trump on Obama birth certificate

Apr 13, 2011

Cantor blasts Trump on Obama birth certificate

02:08 PM
By J. Scott Applewhite, AP

Donald Trump can forget about getting a vote for president from a top House Republican leader.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., dismissed the real estate developer/reality TV star's nascent candidacy today -- in part because Trump keeps pushing the issue of President Obama's birth certificate.

"I don't think he is really serious when we ... see a campaign launched on the birther issue," Cantor said today on CNN's American Morning program.

Obama was born in Hawaii, despite repeated attempts by so-called "birthers" in the blogosphere who believe otherwise. Trump told our USA TODAY colleague Jackie Kucinich that he is "amazed Obama has gotten such a free pass on this issue" and has his own investigators digging into this.

Cantor said that there are some "very weighty issues" to tackle and attributes Trump's rise in a recent CNN poll to it being "very early" in the election cycle.

What "the American people are going to look for in a candidate for president in 2012 is I think someone who can be honest with the American people and face facts as far as the debt problem is concerned and lay out there what we're trying to do as Republicans in Congress and say ... we've got to prescribe a solution to fix the problems we're facing."

http://content.usatoday.com/communities ... al-race-/1

Is Trump hype over Obama birth newsworthy?

By DeWayne WickhamUpdated

Donald Trump isn't a birther; he's just pimping off of them.

Recently, the surreality show host and billionaire blowhard has been making the rounds of TV talk shows parroting the long ago debunked assertion that President Obama was born in the African nation of Kenya— not Hawaii.

DeWayne Wickham USA TODAY columnist

If true, which it isn't, that would make Obama ineligible to be president. To give this stale "odor of mendacity" a fresh whiff, Trump announced with a straight face on NBC's Today that he has dispatched his own investigators to Hawaii to ferret out his version of the truth.

"I have people that actually have been studying it, and they cannot believe what they are finding," he said about the birth records Hawaii officials have for Obama. Trump, who hosts The Celebrity Apprentice— the peacock network's top-rated show — got away with that conspiracy theorist tease during an interview with Today show host Meredith Vieira without being asked what his sleuths found.

Never mind that both Hawaii's current governor, Democrat Neil Abercrombie, and his predecessor, Republican Linda Lingle, have said that state records show Obama was born in Hawaii. Trump persists in demanding that the president personally satisfy him that he was born in America.

"If he weren't lying why wouldn't he just solve it?" Trump said on Today. "I would like to have him show his birth certificate."

Why Trump is doing this is unclear. He wraps his questions about the authenticity of Obama's official birth record with chest-thumping talk of how he might run for president to save us from Obama's mismanagement of the nation's affairs. But that decision won't come before this season's final episode of his TV show airs in late May. To enter the race sooner wouldn't be fair to NBC, which has to take his show off the air if he becomes a presidential candidate. Now that's a guy who has his priorities in the right order. Right?

Of course, the other possibility is that by fanning the flames of the birther movement, Trump is using this issue to build an even larger audience for his show with appearances on other broadcast and cable networks that are being duped into treating what he says as something that is newsworthy.

It isn't.

However, Trump's harangue about Obama's birth record appears to have made him the darling of a sizeable chunk of would-be Republican Party primary voters. He's tied for second place (17%) with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee in a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal Survey of GOP voters who were asked who they favored for the party's presidential nomination. Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, finished first with the support of 21% of the respondents.

I suspect Trump is, at heart, neither a Republican nor a birther. He's a mountebank — a flamboyant and deceptive hawker of his own interests. He's a guy who has managed to amass enormous wealth while attaching his name to multimillion-dollar real estate deals that went bad and billion-dollar casinos that ended up in bankruptcy court.

In a recent letter to The New York Times, Trump accused the news media of shielding Obama from the charge that he is not a U.S. citizen. "What they don't realize is that if he was not born in the United States," he said, "they would have uncovered the greatest 'scam' in the history of our country."

But, in truth, the great scam journalists and others in the media have yet to uncover is the one that keeps Donald Trump in the national spotlight.

DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/fo ... _ST1_N.htm

I guess it's normal for people to spend a ton of money to stop the release of proof of their innocence. Obama is being accused of being a fraud but refuses to show proof that he's not. Is that normal or SANE reasoning???? Remember the brohauha with McCain? There is nothing logical about this and only one conclusion can be reached. There is something that he doesn't want the pubic to see OR it doesn't exist, in Hawaii, at all, which may be the case because the Governor can't find it.

Cantor's only comment should have been for Obama just to show it and STOP all this "craziness." That's what the Hawaii governor was going to do UNTIL he couldn't find the BC. If there had been a long-form available, they would have shown it in the first place, because they KNEW that was the requirement.

The other issue is, WHY would he let all these people think this, including some democrats and have this lurking in the background? It's so simple to fix.

Originally Posted by gofer

. . . The other issue is, WHY would he let all these people think this, including some democrats and have this lurking in the background? It's so simple to fix.

Here is 1 possible explanation.
"(A more cynical view might be that the president thinks the controversy helps rev up his base

and has the added benefit of tying the Republican Party to an extreme right-wing fringe that would never be satisfied with any document that was released.)"

http://primary.washingtonpost.com/blogs ... ml?hpid=z9

http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-234281.html

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