NY Times: Trump, Grand Wizard of Birtherism

[Coyotl]

Another horrible week for Trump, caught up in Scott Walker's criminal conduct and a focus on his birther lunacy. Next week's polls should be interesting.

Trump, Grand Wizard of Birtherism
Charles M. Blow SEPT. 17, 2016

So, on Friday the Grand Wizard of Birtherism against President Obama admitted that birtherism was bunk, not by apologizing for his prominent role in the racist campaign — no, that would have been too right — but by suggesting that he deserved credit for dousing the flames he’d fanned.

This man is so low that he’s subterranean.

Donald Trump said Friday: “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy.”

That was a lie. There is no evidence Hillary Clinton and her campaign either started or took part in the efforts to question the location of Barack Obama’s birth.

He continued: “I finished it.” That was also a lie. .......

So, his admission on Friday was too little, too late; too contrived, too strategic and too lacking in context. In fact, Trump has peddled so many lies about the president that this clearly election-driven, down-to-the-wire political ploy rang hollow and felt like as much of an insult as the original claim. ........

[RandySF]

1. Maybe the press is waking up and realizing this is not a game,

It was all fun when he was beating is primary opponents, but shit's gotten real now and people are about to vote.

[Coyotl]

2. On dKos, a good diary about this turning point for journalists. Liar, liar, pants on fire, ...

seems to be the new media chorus. Kos' front page right now:

View from the Left: The media's birther awakening

This is new, and I love it:

[DarthDem]

7. Go George!!

Good heavens, I love George Takei. His fantastic sense of humor and terrific political sense make me smile every time I see him in an original Star Trek episode, made way before anyone (besides friends and family) knew about these qualities. I'm so glad he's active and so effective. Perfect tweet.

[spiderpig]

9. George Takei was one of the first people I chose to follow on Facebook

He never fails to say the right thing.

[madaboutharry]

3. Charles Blow is a treasure.

I love it when he is a guest on television. He is always the smartest one at the table.

[BumRushDaShow]

4. NYT has gone full court press today

Of course it is Saturday when folks are probably enjoying the weekend. But at least they have taken the time to do some call-outs.

[Coyotl]

5. NYT: Donald Trump Clung to ‘Birther’ Lie for Years, and Still Isn’t Apologetic

Donald Trump Clung to ‘Birther’ Lie for Years, and Still Isn’t Apologetic
By MICHAEL BARBAROSEPT. 16, 2016

It was not true in 2011, when Donald J. Trump mischievously began to question President Obama’s birthplace aloud in television interviews. “I’m starting to think that he was not born here,” he said at the time.

It was not true in 2012, when he took to Twitter to declare that “an ‘extremely credible source’” had called his office to inform him that Mr. Obama’s birth certificate was “a fraud.”

It was not true in 2014, when Mr. Trump invited hackers to “please hack Obama’s college records (destroyed?) and check ‘place of birth.’”

It was never true, any of it. Mr. Obama’s citizenship was never in question. No credible evidence ever suggested otherwise.

Yet it took Mr. Trump five years of dodging, winking and joking to surrender to reality .......

Much has been made of Mr. Trump’s casual elasticity with the truth; he has exhausted an army of fact-checkers with his mischaracterizations, exaggerations and fabrications. But this lie was different from the start, an insidious, calculated calumny that sought to undo the embrace of an African-American president by the 69 million voters who elected him in 2008. ...........

It sure took a while for this article to call Trump a liar, but it does.

[BumRushDaShow]

8. But the Editorial Board did right off the bat

[font size="4"]Donald Trump’s Latest Birther Lie[/font]

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD SEPT. 16, 2016

The midday bulletin arrived as another bizarre moment in the absurdist presidential campaign of Donald Trump: News Alert: Trump admits Obama was born in the United States. What? It read like some variation on “Trump Finds the Earth No Longer Flat.” But no, Mr. Trump, the ultimate mountebank, was at it again, altering but not abandoning the Big Lie campaign that first made him the darling of wing nuts and racists five years ago: his vicious insistence that President Obama was not born a legitimate American citizen.

Did he apologize to Mr. Obama and the American people for the political poison he spread for so long? Of course not. Being Mr. Trump, he instead substituted a lie for a lie. He falsely accused Hillary Clinton of starting the birther myth, then further claimed he had nobly “finished” it off by badgering the White House for proof that Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii, not Africa.

The standard words for campaign mishaps — “flip-flop,” “retreat,” “walk-back” — simply do not apply to this candidate’s spirals through unreality. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Mr. Trump maintained with a straight face, speaking in Washington to a crowd of friendly military veterans. “I finished it.” Then he conceded the truth, an act that must have felt very peculiar to him: “President Barack Obama was born in the United States, period.”

Not quite period, much as Trump strategists now wish it were. Mr. Trump is probably hoping to reassure voters that he is edging into the mainstream, that he is not just the reckless, cynical bully of the Republican primaries. But the birther lies cling to him as tightly as his nativist hallucinators.

<...>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/opinion/donald-trumps-latest-birther-lie.html

[Coyotl]

6. NYT: How Donald Trump Built an Empire on $885 Million in Tax Breaks

How Donald Trump Built an Empire on $885 Million in Tax Breaks
By CHARLES V. BAGLISEPT. 17, 2016

The way Donald J. Trump tells it, his first solo project as a real estate developer, the conversion of a faded railroad hotel on 42nd Street into the sleek, 30-story Grand Hyatt, was a triumph from the very beginning.

The hotel, Mr. Trump bragged in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” his 1987 best seller, “was a hit from the first day. Gross operating profits now exceed $30 million a year.”

But that book, and numerous interviews over the years, make little mention of a crucial factor in getting the hotel built: an extraordinary 40-year tax break that has cost New York City $360 million to date in forgiven, or uncollected, taxes, with four years still to run, on a property that cost only $120 million to build in 1980.

..............