Now Greta Van Susteren Goes Birther On Fox News; Trump Tells Her Birthers Are “Great Americans”
Reported by Ellen - March 29, 2011 -
Chalk up Greta Van Susteren as the latest Fox News host to help legitimize Donald Trump’s birther campaign/swift boating of President Obama. Sure, she put up a few mild objections, just like Geraldo Rivera did. But in the end, also like Geraldo, she let the glaring inconsistencies go by without comment and she never pointed out that the whole “controversy” has been completely, utterly debunked. Oh, and she also missed that while Trump trumpeted his production of his own birth certificate, in fact what he produced was not valid. Obama’s birth certificate on the other hand, is.
Van Susteren sounded admiring (just as Geraldo did) as she noted at the beginning of the interview that Trump had been stirring up controversy with his demand for Obama’s birth certificate.
Rather than offer up the mountain of evidence that led both FactCheck.org and PolitiFact to claim definitively and unequivocally that Obama was born in the U.S., Van Susteren helped legitimize Trump's crazy accusations by making it look like a difference of opinion. She asked, “Why aren’t you satisfied that he has been born in the United States?”
Van Susteren listened politely as Trump spoke for about two minutes with his accusations and suspicions. Finally, at almost three minutes in, she offered a bit of pushback, saying, “I don’t know about the article,” (referring to Trump’s ludicrous claim that Obama’s birth announcement in the Honlulu Advertiser had somehow been a fraud) and, “As for the birth certificate, frankly, although I’m not running for president, I haven’t seen mine in years… The president has a passport… and so I suspect at the time when he got his passport, he had to provide a valid birth certificate.”
She also avoided challenging Trump directly by moving away and saying that the Democrats are using this latest birther attack to raise funds.
Trump strongly disagreed. “I don’t think it’s helping him at all.” But then he whined, “It’s a terrible term, ‘birther.’ … These are great Americans in many cases, in most cases.”
That was it for Van Susteren’s pushback. She changed the subject to whether the likelihood was “greater or less” that Trump will run for president and pressed him for his thoughts on various policy issues. All of which further helped legitimize Trump’s candidacy - and his birther attacks - of course.
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