Jay Carney Invokes Birtherism To Fire Back Against Scandal Outrage

White House press secretary Jay Carney has been under serious pressure to handle the press’ grilling over the big scandals facing the Obama administration this past week, and when people get particularly stressed, they tend to do a lot of deflecting. In Carney’s case, he attempted to dismiss all the criticism of the Benghazi, IRS, and AP scandals (as well as an emerging one about Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius) by digging up what Bill O’Reilly would call an “old canard”: birtherism.

During today’s press briefing, Carney sequentially smacked down the outrage over Benghazi, the IRS, and the AP seizures by blaming most of the scandal fever on over-the-top Republican outrage. When CBS’s Major Garrett threw the fundraising scandal involving Sebelius into the mix, Carney deflected by dismissing all the outrage as misplaced as birtherism.

“We could go down the list of questions–we could say ‘What about the president’s birth certificate? Was that legitimate?'”

At this stage of the game, when outrage is building on both sides of the aisle, it may be just a little too late to dismiss this as just petty politics.

Watch the video below:

h/t BuzzFeed

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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