I read this McClatchy article, Where did the Web rumors about Obama come from? earlier Friday. Working one of the slowest night shifts in a 31 year nursing career (tempting fate here), it came back to me in a different perspective while reading diaries.
The refrain of Hillary's "He's not Electable" song is, he's never been vetted. Consider this:
One practitioner in Virginia, who hates Obama like a dog hates cats, led a reporter through his efforts. Because the man is a retired clandestine CIA officer, identifying him could endanger officers or operations that remain classified, so McClatchy will not reveal his name.
In late 2006, convinced that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for America, he decided to start an anti-Obama operation. He combed the public record on Obama. He used a couple of allies and informants — half-jokingly dubbing his group "The Crusaders" — to learn about Obama's background, especially his Africa connection and how he came to be the editor of the Harvard Law Review.
He assembled a dossier on Obama, including allegations that Obama attended a madrassa, or Islamic religious school, in his youth in Indonesia.
Then the retired spook tried to get Israeli intelligence officials interested in his Obama dossier. They weren't, to his chagrin. He also shopped it to some foreign reporters. Again, no luck.
He wound up posting some of it on a blog — and where it went from there in the vast world of cyberspace is anybody's guess.
Snip...
The retired CIA officer, who said that he and his fellow Crusaders have abandoned their effort, said he wasn't the source of the Insight story.
The article was written about an investigation into the sources of stupid rumors on Obama swirling over the Internet. Author Matt Stearns suggests "they tend to be the work of committed political amateurs."
Wouldn't a trained CIA officer have a few transferable investigational skills that could be directly applied to this part of politics? This CIA officer developed a dossier on Obama and tried to market it to anyone. No takers. He posted the info on a blog. Whether it died there or gradually gained enough distribution to surface in the limelight is difficult to say. The fact that some of the information is similar to what he dug up suggests to me that we may have what there is. If the man "who hates Obama like a dog hates cats" gave up, is it likely that there just isn't much to work with?
Granted the GOP has successfully worked many stupid and false rumors into major issues. Maybe I'm being too optimistic here. Maybe the GOP is saving some stuff for October.
Does this tactic seem to be working as well this election? The public has grown wise to it and the response time has been trimmed to the same news cycle many times. And the result:
"He's proven to be pretty resilient," said Burdett Loomis, a political scientist at the University of Kansas.
Seems to me like Obama is a very reasonable gamble when it comes to what might be in his closet for the Republicons to use for Halloween costumes.
Besides, I've known plenty of dogs that learned to like cats.