PSA: Don't be baited by the bullshit.

[beam me up scottie]

10. Then you weren't paying attention in 2008:

Clinton aides claim Obama photo wasn't intended as a smear
Ewen MacAskill in Washington
Monday 25 February 2008



Barack Obama, right, is dressed as a Somali elder by Sheikh Mahmed Hassan, left, during his visit to Wajir in northeastern Kenya, near the borders with Somalia and Ethiopia

Barack Obama's campaign team today accused Hillary Clinton's beleaguered staff of mounting a desperate dirty tricks operation by circulating a picture of him in African dress, feeding into false claims on US websites that he is a Muslim.

Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, described it as "the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we've seen from either party in this election". Obama has had to spend much of the campaign stressing he is a Christian not a Muslim and did not study at a madrassa.

Aides for Mrs Clinton, who is fighting a last-ditch battle to keep her hopes of the White House alive, initially tried to brush off the furore, but later denied having anything to do with the distribution of the picture. "I just want to make it very clear that we were not aware of it, the campaign didn't sanction it and don't know anything about it," Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson told reporters. "None of us have seen the email in question."

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/25/barackobama.hillaryclinton

Obama Trounces Clintons’ Racist, Entitled S.C. Campaign
Posted: January 27, 2008
Matthew Rothschild

The trouncing that Hillary Clinton got in South Carolina proved that the racist and entitled campaign that the Clintons ran there backfired.

The Clinton campaign kept saying, “He’s black, black, black,” as author and South Carolina activist Kevin Alexander Gray pointed out on Jesse Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive” program Sunday morning. And Bill Clinton used coded language, like the “old okie-dokie,” which served to remind whites of Obama’s blackness, Gray added. That's like saying don’t fall for the old “shuck and jive.”

And speaking of “shuck and jive,” that’s exactly the phrase Andrew Cuomo used to disparage Obama in New Hampshire, saying he can’t use that “shuck and jive” at press conferences.

Obama’s black, get it.

Or Bob Kerrey, another Clinton supporter, saying, “I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim,” and that he went to school in a madrassa, as Bob Herbert noted in The New York Times. Kerrey later apologized, Herbert added, as did Andrew Young, for saying, “Bill is every bit as black as Barack. He’s probably gone with more black women than Barack.”

Or take Bill Clinton's ludicrous comment that Hillary is "stronger than Nelson Mandela." (The not-so-subtle dig being that she's not only stronger than that black man Obama, she's stronger than the strongest black man on the face of the Earth.)

To say nothing of the nonsense about Clinton being the first black President, which Obama was forced to address in the CNN debate, and which Bill Clinton seems to revel in.

(Racist tactics are nothing new for Bill Clinton. After he all, he used the “Sister Souljah” comment to wink at the white base in 1992, and he made a point to hustle back to Arkansas during that campaign just so he could execute a mentally retarded black man named Rickie Ray Rector.)

And sure enough, after the embarrassing loss, the Clinton campaign tried to dismiss the results by stressing the black vote that Obama got and by mentioning that Jesse Jackson had won South Carolina in 1988, as well.

http://progressive.org/news/2008/01/5995/obama-trounces-clintons%E2%80%99-racist-entitled-sc-campaign

Hillary Clinton needs to address the racist undertones of her 2008 campaign
Ryan Cooper
July 23, 2015

McKesson is right to be suspicious. Hillary Clinton's record on race is not great. If she wishes to earn some trust on issues of racial justice, a good place to start would be with the distinctly racist undertones of her 2008 campaign against Barack Obama.

As the first primaries got underway in 2008, and Obama began to slowly pull ahead, the Clinton camp resorted to increasingly blatant race- and Muslim-baiting. It started in February, when Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, endorsed Obama in a sermon. In a debate a couple days later, moderator Tim Russert repeatedly pressed Obama on the issue, who responded with repeated reassurances that he did not ask for the endorsement, did not accept it, and in fact was not a deranged anti-Semite. That wasn't enough for Clinton, who demanded that Obama "denounce" Farrakhan, which he did.

About the same time, a picture of Obama in traditional Somali garb (from an official trip) then appeared on the Drudge Report, and Matt Drudge claimed he got it from the Clinton campaign. After stonewalling on the origin question, the campaign later claimed it had nothing to do with it. A Clinton flack then went on MSNBC and argued that Obama should not be ashamed to appear in "his native clothing, in the clothing of his country."

Later, a media firestorm blew up when it was discovered that Obama's Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright once delivered a sermon containing the words "God damn America." In response, Obama gave a deft, nuanced speech on racial issues, but Clinton kept the issue alive by insisting she would have long ago denounced the man.

The late Michael Hastings, who covered Clinton's campaign, described one instance of this strategy on the ground:

[Clinton supporter] Buffenbarger launched into a rant in which he compared Obama to Muhammad Ali, the best-known black American convert to Islam after Malcolm X. "But brothers and sisters," he said, "I've seen Ali in action. He could rope-a-dope with Foreman inside the ring. He could go toe-to-toe with Liston inside the ring. He could get his jaw broken by Norton and keep fighting inside the ring. But Barack Obama is no Muhammad Ali." The cunning racism of the attack actually made my heart start to beat fast and my ears start to ring. For the first time on the campaign trail, I felt completely outraged. I kept thinking, "Am I misreading this?" But there was no way, if you were in that room, to think it was anything other than what it was. [GQ]

Then there was Bill Clinton comparing Obama's campaign to that of Jesse Jackson's unsuccessful run in 1988. The capstone came in May, when Hillary Clinton started openly boasting about her superior support from white voters.

The effort was not so blatant as George H.W. Bush's Willie Horton ad, but the attempt to play on racist attitudes through constant repetition and association was unmistakable — in addition to playing into right-wing conspiracy theories that Obama is a secret Muslim who was born in Africa. It's likely why in West Virginia — a state so racist that some guy in a Texas prison got 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 2012 — Clinton won a smashing victory.

http://theweek.com/articles/567774/hillary-clinton-needs-address-racist-undertones-2008-campaign

Obama Skin Tone Darker In Clinton Ad?
Mar 28, 2008 | Updated May 25, 2011

I went and got the original footage from the Clinton ad, and then compared it to 3 different video clips of the same debate from 3 different sources. I did this so as to take into account any editing, or quality issues, that might have accounted for Obama having darker skin in any particular video. None of the 3 video sources I found showed Obama nearly as black as the Hillary ad does. Click the image above to see a larger version. Look at his lips. Look at his eyebrows. Look at how the red MSNBC background has turned more purple. Clearly the image was darkened. The question is "why."

Make the comparison yourself:



http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/obama-skin-tone-darker-in_n_89829.html