On the latest incomplete thought trotted out by the "talking heads," the question is who started the birther question / issue?  Note that it doesn't matter who brought it up, it matters who used it.

This false equivalence also brings up the question of having a public position different from a public position.  Do you really believe Trump does not have a private position on a topic where he has spoken a different public position?  Common man!  Don't be intentionally stupid!

Hillary Clinton may have talked about Obama's birth certificate in private surroundings, but did not go to the media with it, i.e., did not take it to the public.

Donald Trump saw the birth certificate issue as an opportunity, so he made it a focal point of his campaign platform!

In case a reader cannot see what I wrote, I will say it again.  Talking about Obama's birth certificate and flouting the issue are different!

* Folks like to credit Obama with anything they do not like so they call the ACA "Obama Care" to disparage it.  Obama is black, many white Americans do not like black people, so the ACA can be smeared by calling it by a black man's name, right?

False equivalence again: The difference in this birth certificate issue is that Donald Trump went public again and again to push the issue.  After it came up in her campaign, Hillary Clinton dropped it for what it was in 2008, a racist or, at best, race baiting issue.

At FactCheck.org

http://www.factcheck.org/2015/07/was-hillary-clinton-the-original-birther/

Please get the facts.

"It is certainly interesting, and perhaps historically and politically relevant, that “birther” advocacy may have originated with supporters of Hillary Clinton — especially since many view it as an exclusively right-wing movement. But whether those theories were advocated by Clinton and/or her campaign or simply by Clinton “supporters” is an important distinction. Candidates are expected to be held accountable for the actions of their campaigns. Neither Cruz nor Trump, whose campaign did not respond to our request for backup material, provides any compelling evidence that either Clinton or her campaign had anything to do with starting the so-called birther movement."
— Robert Farley

Also, go here to read early NY Times reports by ASHLEY PARKER and STEVE EDER, 2 July 2016, of how the birther issue got handled by Donald Trump so you can avoid the false equivalence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/us/politics/donald-trump-birther-obama.html?_r=0

 "

Joseph Farah, a 61-year-old author, had long labored on the fringes of political life, publishing a six-part series claiming that soybeans caused homosexuality and fretting that “cultural Marxists” were plotting to destroy the country.

But in early 2011, he received the first of several calls from a Manhattan real estate developer who wanted to take one of his theories mainstream.

That developer, Donald J. Trump, told Mr. Farah that he shared his suspicion that President Obama might have been born outside the United States and that he was looking for a way to prove it.

“What can we do to get to the bottom of this?” Mr. Trump asked him. “What can we do to turn the tide?”

Mr. Farah recalled that Mr. Trump even proposed dispatching private investigators to Hawaii, Mr. Obama’s birthplace, to resolve the debate.

Mr. Trump’s eagerness to embrace the so-called birther idea — long debunked, and until then confined to right-wing conspiracy theorists — foreshadowed how, just five years later, Mr. Trump would bedevil his rivals in the Republican presidential primary race and upend the political system.

In the birther movement, Mr. Trump recognized an opportunity to connect with the electorate over an issue many considered taboo: the discomfort, in some quarters of American society, with the election of the nation’s first black president. He harnessed it for political gain, beginning his connection with the largely white Republican base that, in his 2016 campaign, helped clinch his party’s nomination.

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“The appeal of the birther issue was, ‘I’m going to take this guy on, and I’m going to beat him,’” said Sam Nunberg, who was one of Mr. Trump’s advisers during that period but was fired from his current campaign. “It was a great niche and wedge issue.”

And starting in March 2011, when he first began to test the idea that a reality television star with no political experience could mount a campaign for the presidency, Mr. Trump could not stop talking about it."

This is an example of a private position versus a public stance on an issue.