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For the elite political press, Beggar's Day finally arrived. In an interview with The Washington Post's Robert Costa, Donald Trump again declined to speculate on the president's birthplace. This set off a scramble in the court of the Czar, which culminated in a statement from its communications director that fairly well suits what Mary McCarthy once said about Lillian Hellman and the truth–every word of the statement is a lie, except (perhaps) the communications director's name.

Hillary Clinton's campaign first raised this issue to smear then-candidate Barack Obama in her very nasty, failed 2008 campaign for President. This type of vicious and conniving behavior is straight from the Clinton Playbook. As usual, however, Hillary Clinton was too weak to get an answer. Even the MSNBC show Morning Joe admits that it was Clinton's henchmen who first raised this issue, not Donald J. Trump. In 2011, Mr. Trump was finally able to bring this ugly incident to its conclusion by successfully compelling President Obama to release his birth certificate. Mr. Trump did a great service to the President and the country by bringing closure to the issue that Hillary Clinton and her team first raised. Inarguably, Donald J. Trump is a closer. Having successfully obtained President Obama's birth certificate when others could not, Mr. Trump believes that President Obama was born in the United States.

This is as brazen and as easily disproved a crock of beans as anything ever conjured up by a 4-year-old who gets caught drawing on the wall with his crayons. To be fair, this preposterous trip up Bandini Mountain was shredded almost on the spot. Philip Bump of the Post did a good job of work on it, and Mark Murray of NBC was one of several people who noted that El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago was tweeting out birther comments long after 2011. But pecking at this thing won't do it. This is OJ's search for the real killers right here.

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Another reason why Trump can't escape 'Birther' past -- just look at his stmts AFTER birth certificate release pic.twitter.com/sEFj133CUj — Mark Murray (@mmurraypolitics) September 16, 2016

Trump knows that his whole political persona is built on his racist campaign to delegitimize the first African-American president. That was one of the foundation stones of the racist and xenophobic campaign that has brought him as far as he is right now. The other foundation stone is his dead-bang certainty that Donald J. Trump is the smart one, and everybody else, especially the people supporting him, is stupid.

Look at that statement. Its contempt for the truth is matched only by its contempt for the people at whom it was directed. Earlier, his putative campaign spokesperson Kellyanne Conway got treed by Andrea Mitchell on the Trump campaign's bold lie that Hillary Rodham Clinton has "no plan" for child-care, as opposed to the Fantasmic Feature that the Princess Royal unveiled the other day. When confronted with the 120,000 words of detailed issue proposals that have been up on the HRC campaign website for months now, Conway replied:

Well, the hundred and some thousand words definitely sounds like something a politician and a bureaucrat does. They do it with our tax code, they do it on their website. If we're going to run this election expecting voters to go to our websites and figure out what these people believe on policy, I respect the voters more than that.

Translation from the original weaselspeak:

Mitchell: You say she has no policy proposal. She has lots of them. See?

Conway: WORDS! THERE ARE TOO MANY WORDS! THEY ARE TAKING OVER THE PLANET!

Mitchell: [rethinking her career choice]

Conway: I respect the voters through my unbounded faith in the fact that many of them are content to be uninformed dolts.

And then, of course, there was the farce in which he engaged on Friday morning. It was supposed to be a news conference at which he would address the subject of his birtherism. Instead, he suckered the cable news people into broadcasting a 25-minute infomercial for his new Washington hotel, used winners of the Congressional Medal of Honor as human shields–that one guy who said the military wasn't respected in 1986 lived through a different 1986 than I did–and then gave a three-sentence statement on the alleged topic du jour. Two of the sentences were lies.

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Hillary Rodham Clinton did not start the birther movement.

Donald Trump did not end it.

Period. Full stop.

And here's where the test comes in. The Trump campaign believes that the elite political media is as much of a dumb beast as the Trump campaign believes the voters are. There is no longer any reason to cover this campaign as anything but a truthless danger to the American republic. It is a freak show, a carny act the pyrotechnics of which threaten to burn everything down around them. Are we all as dumb as they think we are? Are we a nation of easy marks? Those answers are still unclear.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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