the smear machine isn’t functioning properly.
By Below, Bean points us to the NRO’s campaign spot blog, calling for the release of Obama’s birth certificate for some truly strange reasons (more good snark on the logic behind these “controversies” from marvelous Jesse Taylor, fresh off his sabbatical in The Real World).
Inexplicably, I’ve perused NRO’s The Corner blog occasionally over the years, but this is my first exposure to The campaign spot blog. This would seem to be a good place to watch the right wing smear machine functioning in the early stages. So, let’s see what they’ve been up to lately.
The issue that seems to be generating the most excitement at the moment is the “Jim Johnson controversy,” in which Obama places a businessman tied to the home mortgage crisis on his VP selection committee. See here, here and here. This is going to be a tricky one, as the ability to score any kind of relative gains with this is reliant on no reciprocal attention to the unsavory connections of McCain’s associates. Since he’s already been forced to bid adieu to his Myanmar junta lobbyists, I’m not sure this is a winning strategy overall for the GOP.
So what else have they got? Other than the birth certificate nonsense, the last few days have seen:
Some people like Obama a lot, and he’s not doing anything to stop them!
McCain would be in fine shape if only white people voted.
Obama may have written some of his first book ON FOREIGN SOIL!
That, aside from a bit of McCain campaign stenography, is all they’ve got. I am a worrier and a pessimist, and I was expecting to find something that would feed those impulses, but it’s just not there. We’ve worked very hard to steel ourselves for the onslaught of the right wing smear machine, perhaps for good reason. But, a) that machine has suffered some collateral damage from the hit the Republican party has taken in the last four years, and b)some on the left may have been so concerned about underestimating it that we ended up overestimating it instead.