Former Colorado Congressman, right-wing icon and talk-radio host Tom Tancredo says he guessed right on the birth certificate. In April of last year on the Alan Colmes radio show, he told listeners President Obama was intentionally delaying release of his birth certificate so that the birther movement would burn hotter and hotter and make the Republican Party and its leaders waffling on the topic appear ridiculous.
“Obama has followed Mohammed, not the religious leader, but the boxer. President Obama has pulled off the perfect Mohammed Ali rope-a-dope,” Tancredo said in a release Friday underlining his alleged prescience on the birther conspiracy as a way to pitch his own radio show.
The release includes this exchange between Tancredo and Colmes last April:
TANCREDO: Now they very well may not want to show it because they want to propagate this whole thing that’s going on about birthers. … They may be doing it for that reason; I don’t know why they don’t want anyone to see it. … They want it propagated because you know –
COLMES: It makes your party look nuts!
TANCREDO: Yeah well maybe that’s why they don’t produce the document.
The president brought out his “long-form” birth certificate Wednesday, he said, to try to dampen discussion in the media about his citizenship, which has been called into question since before he was elected to office and which has generated a cottage industry on the right.
Conservative radio and blogs have hummed with the conspiracy for years. Believers bought billboard ads in cities around the nation demanding to know “Where’s the birth certificate?” Many birthers believe Obama was born in Kenya and that he has paid millions of dollars in a birth-certificate related cover up.
Mainstream Republican leaders have traded on the conspiracy to win favor with far-right voters.
Lat year, Colorado GOP Rep. Cory Gardner in his race to unseat Democrat Betsy Markey gave a typically equivocal response on the stump to a question from the crowd about Obama’s citizenship.
“Do you know for a fact if Barack Obama was born in the United States?” asked an audience member.
“Based on what they’ve shown, what they’ve tried to say, I think the administration is trying to say he was born in this country. I know what everybody else knows.”
Later, a Gardner spokesman told reporters that Gardner believes Obama is “most likely” a citizen.
Tancredo feels Obama the whole time was undertaking shrewd political strategery.
“Tancredo feels this has been nothing more than political covert operations,” said the release.
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