During this long election season, one of the things that the candidates have had to confront are smear merchants, peddling the most vicious and hateful of innuendos. By any measure, it would appear that Barack Obama has had the worst of it this election season, but John McCain is no stranger to those sorts of attacks, either. Nor is he a stranger to those sorts of attackers, having hired them to work on his campaign. Along the way, the media has had a difficult time confronting these smears and debunking the debunkable. After all, isn't simply restating the smear just, on one level ... one vastly stupid level ... just confirming the smear? Plus, don't time-honored press traditions require reporters to treat crackpots who shout drooling epithets from America's finest bus stations as the equivalent of experts with advanced degrees from leading universities?
Well, Jim Rutenberg has hit upon a novel way of confronting the smear-traffickers: write a story and call them liars! It's so crazy that it just might work!
Of course, one still mourns how, in life, timing is everything:
Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.
But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.
In this case, so much depends upon when an organ like the New York Times decides is the right time to start telling an essential truth. Without a trace of irony, or remorse, Rutenberg actually describes how a bunch of lowly blogs had this story foregrounded -- and had this story right -- for some time now. I guess it's that descriptor, "liberal," that made it impossible for the traditional media to report out! Finally, Martin ended up on Sean Hannity's show, his ravings presented as documentary fact, and even then, the Times said, "No, no. Now's not the right time. Let's wait a week, and then we'll do the story." So, for whatever reason, an essential truth about someone who's been persistently driving a lot of the Obama fearmongery was left to pickle and brine until Sunday, for editorial reasons that no doubt defy any sensible explanation.
The piece on Martin is fronted by the disclosure that he's a guy who loves nothing more than to file frivolous lawsuits, and who has done so for such a long time that he's had his lawsuit-filing privileges revoked. But, hey! You already know that, don't you! Just like everyone who's looked this cuckoo-log up on the Wikipedia knows.
The article captures Martin's whole history as a crackpot burr in the ass of polite and decent society -- the exaggerated claims, the rampant anti-Semitism, the grist he provided for the toxic mill known as Obama Nation -- the "widely discredited best seller" from Jerome Corsi. And on that last point is the part of the story that Rutenberg missed: Martin's falsehoods fueled a best-selling book! And this wasn't a commercial enterprise that stayed solely in the family of fringe wackjobs -- Obama Nation was published by Mary Matalin, who has defended the efforts behind this great work by calling it, "a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that." Never let it be said that this poison fruit didn't fall from an establishment tree.