Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

Joe Conason wrote about the recent false claims that Barack Obama went to a madrassa as a child, noting the long tradition of such Republican slime:

Yet on the far right, poisonous propaganda can be concocted from the most innocent ingredients. That is precisely what the Unification Church’s Insight magazine proceeded to do on Jan. 19, with the eager assistance of Fox News Channel and right-wing Web sites such as Lucianne.com. Insight portrayed the Indonesian school as a “madrassa,” suggesting the Saudi-financed institutions that allegedly train Wahhabi terrorists in Pakistan and elsewhere, indicated, to incite religious prejudice, that Obama had been “raised Muslim” — and then attributed these fabrications to political operatives in the Clinton camp.

These false claims lacked any sourcing, but that didn’t prevent the usual media miscreants from broadcasting them, from John Gibson on Fox’s “The Big Story” and Rush Limbaugh down to Melanie Morgan and her sidekick at San Francisco’s KSFO radio station. Just the usual modus operandi of the noise machine — except for that telltale twist of smearing Clinton with responsibility for the attack.

Where could they have gotten that brilliant idea?

Performing a dirty trick on one Democratic presidential candidate in a way that would reflect blame on another Democrat was the specialty of the Watergate crew led by Hunt, which back in the early ’70s included G. Gordon Liddy and Donald Segretti, as well as a host of lesser goons and spies such as the ingénue Lucianne Goldberg.

According to “Nightmare: Underside of Nixon Years,” the definitive book on the Watergate scandal, by the late, great journalist J. Anthony Lukas, Goldberg filed gossipy espionage reports from George McGovern’s press plane on “who was sleeping with whom, what the Secret Service men were doing with the stewardesses, who was smoking pot on the plane — that sort of thing.” Or so she told him.

Meanwhile, Segretti and company had been putting out nasty smear stories about certain Democratic candidates and attributing the smears to other Democrats, in order to divide the opposition and destroy Nixon’s potential competitors.

Conason ties in the dirty tricks of the Nixon era to those who do the same today:

It is worth pointing out that Goldberg is not the only contemporary propagandist whose sordid roots trace back to Tricky Dick. Fox News is the creature of Roger Ailes, the jolly face of the Nixon gang, and Gibson and all of the other spewing heads on that network are his minions and nothing more. The Rev. Sun Myung Moon was among the last and most bitter defenders of Nixon, whose brainwashed “Moonies,” just as obedient as any Fox anchor, stepped lively whenever they were ordered to demonstrate against impeachment on the steps of the Capitol.

Despite the right-wing regression to such ugly tactics against Clinton and Obama, there was a moment of hope as well. Rather than simply repeat the charges and rebuttals as if each bore equal weight, CNN sent an actual reporter to Obama’s old school, who demolished the tale — and at the same time, the news network emphasized that there was no evidence whatsoever linking Clinton to the attack. If such old-fashioned journalism is the template for campaign coverage this year and next, the dirty tricksters could soon face the unforgiving scrutiny they have always deserved.

If only the media had done their job better to immediately investigate the false claims of the Swift Boat Liars.