Six months of RW e-mail, months of robo calls and endless pretense from Hillary's campaign

[ProSense]

Former journalist Sidney Blumenthal has been widely credited with coining the term "vast right-wing conspiracy" used by Hillary Clinton in 1998 to describe the alliance of conservative media, think tanks, and political operatives that sought to destroy the Clinton White House where he worked as a high-level aide. A decade later, and now acting as a senior campaign advisor to Senator Clinton, Blumenthal is exploiting that same right-wing network to attack and discredit Barack Obama. And he's not hesitating to use the same sort of guilt-by-association tactics that have been the hallmark of the political right dating back to the McCarthy era.

Almost every day over the past six months, I have been the recipient of an email that attacks Obama's character, political views, electability, and real or manufactured associations. The original source of many of these hit pieces are virulent and sometimes extreme right-wing websites, bloggers, and publications. But they aren't being emailed out from some fringe right-wing group that somehow managed to get my email address. Instead, it is Sidney Blumenthal who, on a regular basis, methodically dispatches these email mudballs to an influential list of opinion shapers -- including journalists, former Clinton administration officials, academics, policy entrepreneurs, and think tankers -- in what is an obvious attempt to create an echo chamber that reverberates among talk shows, columnists, and Democratic Party funders and activists. One of the recipients of the Blumenthal email blast, himself a Clinton supporter, forwards the material to me and perhaps to others.

These attacks sent out by Blumenthal, long known for his fierce and combative loyalty to the Clintons, draw on a wide variety of sources to spread his Obama-bashing. Some of the pieces are culled from the mainstream media and include some reasoned swipes at Obama's policy and political positions.

link

Keystone (cops) Voter Registration

We're continuing to dig into what's going on with Women's Voices, Women Vote, the DC non-profit behind those suspicious robocalls in North Carolina. We've looked into the group's activities in other states and at least outside of North Carolina it's really difficult to figure out whether the group was up to no good or just mind-numbingly incompetent. Purportedly, WVWV's aim was to register unmarried women. But in state after state (Virginia, Arizona, Colorado, Wisconsin, et al.) the group's mailings spurred investigations or rebukes from state election authorities for sending people registration forms after the deadlines, or sending mailings that suggested recipients were legally required to return them signed, to just freaking people out. (For more details, see , which pulled all this information together.)southernstudies.org/facingsouth/2008/04/facing-south-exclusive-dc-nonprofit.asp

That's not a good record. And secretaries of state offices in states around the country seem to have been complaining for months. But in these other states at least it's not clear that WVWV is guilty of anything more than really heavy-handed mailers trying to sign up unmarried female voters, even if the recipients were sometimes married.

Setting aside the incidents in North Carolina, that we're still looking into, it seems like in the rest of the country the group was involved in legitimate voter-registration efforts for a targeted group even though they went about it in heavy-handed way and sometimes confused voters by failing to note key registration deadlines.

Late Update: Mike Lux, who's on the group's board, vouches for the group and Page Gardner, who runs the operation.

Even Later Update: Seems the group flubbed the deadline in Oregon too.

Cease and Desist

The attorney general for North Carolina has stepped into the "Women's Voices Women Vote" robocall controversy.

When Hillary's camp cites "memo" as race card, they always leave out the details before and after it

Hillary Clinton is deeply, grievously, morally wrong


It's time to officially call out Hillary's campaign for their lies, divisiveness, race baiting and RW tactics.

[grantcart]

1. k and r

[uponit7771]

2. 6 months of this and still no big moves on the impartant Obama polls

[ProSense]

5. The impact is there. n/t

[Jane Austin]

3. And yet Bill Clinton has the nerve to call Obama's supporters

People who "think they're better than you are and who think they get to play by a different set of rules".

I didn't think I was so much better than you that I didn't vote for you twice, Bill, you ungrateful asshole.

[ProSense]

4. He's isn't coming off as a guy out of touch with the times (typical excuse),

he's sounding more and more like a jerk.

[ProSense]

6. Everyone is pretending to be shocked by the nasty details

BREAKING: Team Clinton 1992: Hoosiers are "worthless white ni**ers"

All the BS Hillary has been accusing Obama of---from guilt by association to disenfranchising voters to being elitist to race baiting---is simply projecting. Her campaign is a disgrace.

[ProSense]

7. What a crock! Joe Conason doing damage control for Blumenthal

Did Sidney Blumenthal cross the line?

Some bloggers accuse Blumenthal, a Hillary advisor, of spreading right-wing lies about Obama. But I get his e-mail blasts and the charge isn't fair.

By Joe Conason

May 2, 2008 | First let me confess that I am now and have for many years considered myself a friend of Sidney Blumenthal's, the senior advisor to Sen. Hillary Clinton and former Salon columnist. I should also acknowledge here for the record that, like a number of his other friends, I receive daily e-mails from him on a wide variety of topics. Those e-mails, which have included everything from Doonesbury cartoons to YouTube videos, screen captures, poll results, right-wing screeds and the occasional scholarly article, must number in the thousands by now because sending those blasts has been a Blumenthal habit since long before he joined the Clinton campaign earlier this year.

If this were a more sane campaign, those mundane messages would be of little interest to anyone else. But now Peter Dreier, blogging on the Huffington Post, has suggested that Blumenthal crossed a line by sending out negative articles about Sen. Barack Obama that have appeared in the right-wing media. And Dreier, along with several other bloggers, also seems to believe that the recipients of those e-mails, especially the journalists, ought to have "exposed" Blumenthal for "spreading" the calumnies and criticisms that appeared in those articles -- which included some far-fetched smears of Obama and his associates.

<...>

Glancing over the assortment of people on Sid's list, some of whom are well known, it should be clear that none of them was likely to credit or repeat the scurrilous nonsense spread by Accuracy in Media, to take one of Dreier's examples. Nobody on that list would believe that Obama shares the political views of an alleged communist whom he knew as a child -- or for that matter that he approves of the Weather Underground bombings carried out by Bill Ayers, which took place when the Democratic front-runner was 8 years old.

It is worth noting that Blumenthal's list includes Thomas Edsall, a distinguished journalist and author who has known him since they worked together at the Washington Post. Apparently Edsall, who now serves as political editor of the Huffington Post, where the Dreier article screams across the front page, never considered Sid's e-mails to be worthy of news coverage.

Occasionally some of Blumenthal's friends expressed objections to the items he sent out, and I sometimes replied to him with a mocking jab myself. But those were all private exchanges. I reject the idea that I am obliged to report on my conversations, whether electronic or verbal, with a campaign aide, even on the most controversial matters.

When the Clinton campaign distributed stories from discredited right-wing publications to attack an Obama advisor in March, I wrote a column noting that it had crossed a line and that Clinton herself was coming perilously close to imitating her old enemies. But in that case, her campaign aides were openly endorsing nasty, inaccurate attacks on Gen. Merrill McPeak in the American Spectator and World Net Daily. As I said then, I believe the excesses of nitpicking negative campaigning have diminished both candidates, but especially Hillary Clinton. (I doubt Sid liked that column much -- or many of the columns I've written about this campaign and his candidate, for that matter. But he still sends me clips, links and polls, many of them quite useful to anybody covering this campaign.)

Recitations of fact won't dissuade people who are determined, for their own opportunistic reasons, to promote conspiracy theories about Blumenthal and to impute some kind of "guilt" to anyone associated with him. I know because I've been through all this before on a much larger scale.

It is easy to pretend that Obama's political problems are somehow Blumenthal's fault or the fault of a dozen people who received his e-mails. The only problem is it's not true -- and the accusations won't help Obama.

(emphasis)

Nobody believe it, huh? Was George Stephanopoulos on the list?

This just proves a involvement by another direct link to Hillary's campaign, Peter Daou.

Hillary's campaign has been exposed. Why is Conason making excuses?

Where is Hillary, Wolfson and Ickes?