This lie has been allowed to fester and live for too long. While McCain has made occasional comments rejecting the notion that Barack Obama is a "secret Muslim," this latest development shows that there is still work to be done.
This story, posted this morning on the Huffington Post:
GOP Operative Releases Obama Muslim Ad
This is courtesy of our old friend Floyd "Willie Horton" Brown, who (as HuffPo points out) is not exactly rolling in either money or credibility at the moment.
This is a story the media seems to be missing because on some level it is so hard to quantify and discuss. It's clear to any thinking person -- even people who despise Obama's political philosophies -- that Barack Obama is NOT a Muslim. In fact, quite a bit of hay has been made about the fact that he attended a certain church in Chicago for over twenty years. After Hillary gave a half-hearted endorsement of Obama's spirituality on 60 Minutes and Steve Kroft flummoxed an Ohio voter by assuring him that Obama was not a Muslim, the issue now seems to be relegated to this kind of curious afterthought in most analysis. "Then there's the 12% of people who think Obama is a Muslim," the pundits joke. "Guess there's nothing we can do about that." E.D. Hill makes a comment about the "Terrorist Fist Bump" and everyone looks at her like "Oh, what a silly Fox news airhead," without raking her over the coals publicly for perpetuating this dangerous and hateful rumor.
The Fox news comments, sly insinuations by Joe Lieberman about Hamas, the references to Obama's middle name, and the slimy e-mails have NOT been rejected EMPHATICALLY by the McCain camp. If John McCain is interesting in running an election on the issues and not based on the old politics of hatred and division, then he needs to IMMEDIATELY make it clear that these kinds of attacks on his behalf will not be tolerated because they are lies.
This is the kind of "straight talk" that McCain claims to stand for -- the truth, and keeping the dirt out of national politics. A rejection by McCain would continue to "land" in stories that cover the Obama-Muslim rumors. Every single story about some nutjob ad will include the sentence "Both the Obama and McCain campaigns have clearly rejected the notion that Senator Obama is a Muslim."
Perhaps both the Obama and McCain campaigns could also ask pollsters to quit polling on this question and thereby keeping it "alive" in the minds of polling subjects and the general public. They could certainly respectfully ask the networks and news media to avoid allowing these rumors to take on the guise of "legitimate opinion," or reporting on the rumors because they are "newsworthy" without fully qualifying how incredibly incorrect these rumors are.
You might think it's strange that I am calling on John McCain to do something here -- why would I want to help his credibility or public image? The answer is that I think that EVERYONE should do everything possible to combat this misinformation about Obama. It's the kind of hate speech and racist/nationalist dogma that too often leads to violence and deep-seated misunderstanding. I know the Obama team will have to deny these rumors ad infinitum, but if McCain were to come out and denounce this kind of hatespeak in no uncertain terms, there's a chance that the MSM will follow along and this ugliness can actually be defeated.