ANALYSIS/OPINION:

On evaluating whether or not GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump can win over African-American voters after he demanded President Obama show his birth certificate, MSNBC’s Joy Reid didn’t like what one panelist had to say.

“The birther issue came out of Hillary Clinton’s campaign in the 2008 elections,” said Pastor Darrell Scott, who was on the panel over the weekend, only to be forcefully cut off.

“No, no it didn’t,” Ms. Reid interrupted. “That’s just factually wrong. Even a pastor can’t make this up on my show. This is part of the problem.”

As her show cut away to a commercial break, Ms. Reid added: “No, sir. I respect you as a pastor. You’re not going to come on my show and make things up.”

Sorry, Ms. Reid — but you’re the one that’s making things up, and to be honest, part of the problem.

The birther movement does indeed have Democratic roots, long before Mr. Trump ever brought it up and made it an issue.

“The idea of going after Obama’s otherness dates back to the last presidential election — and to Democrats,” Bloomberg News reported. “Long before Trump started in, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, recognized this potential vulnerability in Obama and sought to exploit it.

“In a March 2007 memo to Clinton (that later found its way to me), Penn wrote: ‘All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared toward showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting it in a new light,’ he wrote. ‘Save it for 2050. It also exposes a very strong weakness for him — his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values,’ ” Bloomberg reported.

Although Mr. Penn never suggested bringing up Mr. Obama’s birth certificate as a strategy to exploit this weakness, he did suggest Mrs. Clinton include a line in every speech saying that she was “born in the middle of America to the middle class in the middle of the last century.”

But that doesn’t stand in the way of the mainstream news media trying to rewrite history.

Brian Stelter, the media columnist at CNN retweeted a “props” to Ms. Reid on confronting Mr. Scott, as well as to himself for confronting Sean Hannity on Mrs. Clinton’s health issues. He then attached a blog post. The post was titled: “Memo to News Media: Consumers Crave Truth, Not Balance.”

To whose truth are we talking? Apparently, only the one the Clinton team has signed off on.

So this election cycle — please don’t believe what you see or watch. The pundits and news media (especially CNN and MSNBC) are the force driving Mrs. Clinton’s campaign forward. (Have you even seen her do a press conference or rally within these last few weeks?)

The answer is no.

Why is that? Because she doesn’t need to. She can take a nice long vacation while the mainstream media does her bidding.

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