McCain/Palin Campaign Relies on Lazy Thinking and Prejudice to WinWed, 09/10/2008 - 11:33 — dlindorff
I got an urgent email from an uncle of mine yesterday evening. A sweet man, retired career military and very religious, he was genuinely worried about an email he had received purporting to convey an article said to have been written by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and published on June 29, 2008 alleging that much of the Obama campaign's "small donations" over the Internet had actually come from several Arab sources overseas.
Now I could see before reading two paragraphs of the alleged column he forwarded to me that it was not Dowd's acerbic and witty writing style, but I cannot expect most people who don't even read Dowd to know that. Two minutes at the computer, however, and I was easily able to confirm, as anyone could do, that Dowd had never written the article. A search of the New York Times archive showed she had written on a wholly different topic--Hillary Clinton--on that day, and moreover, the non-partisan truth-checking website Snopes.com had a full documented debunking of the scam.
Why this particular campaign dirty trick--and with Karl Rove in the back seat of the McCain campaign bus I have no doubt that it originated in the bowels of that campaign, which has not disavowed it--works, and why the many other vile efforts, like the latest shameful official McCain TV ad claiming that Obama backs "sex education for kindergartners," work is that many otherwise decent Americans like my uncle first of all are primed to believe such crap by a deep-seated prejudice against people of color, and secondly that the corporate media which are supposed to be informing us are afraid to call out a mainstream political candidate for lying and deceiving the public. Some, like Fox, actually promote these falsehoods.
Look at the news today. Instead of exposing the blatant campaign of character assassination by the McCain/Palin campaign, it is focused on the bogus (and frivolous) claim by the McCain campaign that Obama has called Palin a "pig with lipstick"! (What did Obama really do? He said that the McCain/Palin ticket's attempt to portray itself as an anti-pork, anti-Washington, reform campaign is like putting lipstick on a pig--a common expression used by McCain himself.) The issue becomes not "Is the McCain campaign charge true?" but rather "Should Obama have to apologize to Palin?"
What's depressing about this is how well the McCain campaign's swim in the sewer is working. A nice kid I know who works at our local garage told me that he couldn't vote for Obama, despite liking his policies, "because he'll take his oath of office on the Koran." Aside from the anti-Muslim bias inherent in this statement, it is based upon false information being spread virally through the internet falsely claiming, on the basis of no evidence, that Obama is a secret Muslim and that he took his Senate oath of office on a Koran. ......(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/200
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