Watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann yesterday on MSNBC (the only hour of basic cable where one might hear something relevant) I learned that Ann Coulter has already begun implementing the far Right's strategy of smearing Barack Obama. Coulter's job is to inject into the Republican echo chamber racist words that would be unacceptable anywhere else. We are drearily familiar with her lies, false accusations, exaggerations, innuendo, and racist attacks while pretending to be "funny." Her bimbo routine for some reason lets her get away with it. Fox News puts her on and then people react to her outlandishness and then repeat it until it seeps into the mainstream (where the Far Right wants it).
With Coulter it is best to look NOT at what she says -- but who she is.
Coulter has given away the far Right's anti-Obama strategy:
1). "You're electing a black guy and he only cares about African Americans"; and
2). "He has a middle name that sounds like a 'terrorist' therefore he's 'soft' on terror and national defense." (John McCain will love this one because it dovetails perfectly with his strategy). It's coming into focus. The far Right wants the Obama campaign to waste a lot of time and energy answering meaningless slurs aimed at driving home these two racist lies.
Well, that might have worked in 2002 or 2003 or 2004 or 2005, but it's not going to work in 2008. We must meet every racist slur and smear thrown Obama's way head on, in real time, so his campaign can focus on more important things and before it can infect the mainstream corporate media.
NBC television anchor, Brian Williams, already injected into one of the debates an insane spam email that was circulating and threw all of the false charges in Obama's face on national television. Jon Stewart of The Daily Show was the only one in the entire TV media that called Williams on this terrible tactic pointing out that citing "something we saw on the Internet" is about as valid as citing something one reads scrawled on the bathroom wall of a gas station. Everyone knows that except apparently Brian Williams.
We will force John McCain to openly denounce on TV each one of Ann Coulter and Company's racist slurs directed at Obama over and over again. We'll reflect right back in their eyes the glare of the klieg lights and expose them as the racists they are. This time we're not going to let them get away with it.