Alex Castellanos is a Trump surrogate who gained notoriety after he called Hillary Clinton the b-word on CNN in 2008. Now he’s back in the spotlight because he just can’t shake the “birther” or “Obama Is A Secret Muslim Movement.”
Trump Surrogate Has Another Racist Idea…Wash, Rinse, Repeat
So Castellanos, head of a Trump-supporting super PAC is now trotting out a familiar and racist cliché — calling out Obama’s “Otherness.”
“I think the big question about Obama is not where he was born or his faith. The big question about Obama is has he been — has he considered himself more of a globalist than an American,” he told Meet The Press host Chuck Todd. “There is an otherness to this president. And people have tried to exploit that politically in different ways.”
Conservatives have been beating the “otherness” drum all the way back to Obama’s first term when they accused him of being a Kenyan Muslim. And they also claimed he harbored “anti-colonial” feelings about the U.S.
Castellanos took to Twitter to try to explain his stupidity, er, I mean terminology. But fortunately that backfired, and Twitter users owned him.
otherness: not faith or race but his cool detachment, intellectual distance + oblig to global v. US responsibilities
— Alex Castellanos (@alexcast) September 18, 2016
Daily Beast editor Goldie Taylor probably came up with the best smack down:
.@alexcast @samsteinhp
— Goldie Taylor (@goldietaylor) September 18, 2016
But some of the other zingers weren’t bad, either:
@alexcast It bothers you that he is smarter and of better character than your cabal? That’s pathetic. @samsteinhp
— J (@LibertyBelleJ) September 18, 2016
.@alexcast Clarity here: POTUS is passionate about his “US responsibilities,” which are constantly thwarted by GOP blockheads in Congress.
— PatrikHenryBass (@PatriksPicks) September 18, 2016
Yeah, right. Pretty pathetic how you won’t even own what you said.
— Charles Johnson (@Green_Footballs) September 18, 2016
Here’s What’s Really Going On:
As Crooks and Liars notes, Castellanos’ entire Meet The Press segment was deceptive. He tries to say that the Clinton campaign started the birther movement. But there’s no evidence that Clinton or her campaign had the slightest thing to do with any false claims that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. Now, some diehard Clinton fanatics tried to push this theory in 2008. But there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest that Clinton or anyone else on her campaign staff was involved.
Progressive strategist Cornell Belcher fended off Castellanos silly accusations reasonably well, but even so the Trump surrogate continued, citing a memo by Mark Penn, who was a Clinton adviser at the time:
“Before you answer, I have it here, from his memo, which Mark (Penn) called “lack of American roots,” in which Mark Penn says, quote, ‘I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not, at his center, fundamentally American in his thinking and values.’ Now, if Donald Trump had said that in 2008, we would all be sitting here saying, ‘Well, that was the start of Birtherism.’”
Except Hillary Clinton didn’t say that.
As Crooks and Liars notes:
“You can’t start a movement by never mentioning it or never acting on a suggestion.”
Chuck Todd should have put a cork in Castellanos, and why he didn’t, I’ll never know.
I guess it’s just convenient to try to blame Clinton now that Trump has had to walk back his birther claims about Obama. And Trump merely looks stupid, but then he looks that way all of the time, for one hundred different reasons. He’s based his entire campaign on lies.
He’s a guy that, like Castellanos, will spend the rest of his life getting owned on Twitter.
So at least there’s that.
Curious to see what this Trump surrogate has to say? Watch the video below to find out.
