OK, freak out if you want, but that means you'll be doing a lot of it in the coming months. Obama will be attacked from every direction, and he'll become the punching bag for the MSM. It's as predictable as sun rise.
Nedra Pickler (Is there a more entertaining name in journalism?) will continue her attacks. Others will jump merrily on the bandwagon. There will be unflattering front page stories in the NYT and other major papers. The talking heads will try and eviscerate him. And republican attacks will be amplified by the media.
It's either going to be OK or not. Obama's campaign will handle it well and defuse these attacks or they won't. Personally, I suspect the campaign has a detailed plan for dealing with it- as they've had for every contingency to date. If not, well, there's not a whole lot we can do about it. Of course we can, and should, contact media outlets that are lying or tailoring a story for their own purposes, but beyond that, it's up to the campaign.
Yeah, I know this is pointless. People will go off in a tizzy over the media's poison, but getting worked up about it doesn't really do much. The swift boating of JK seems to have scared us silly, but JK didn't do a good job of handling it, and even set himself up for it. I don't think Obama's going to do that.
I've said for quite some time, that I've been impressed by how Barack Obama fights. He doesn't telegraph what he's going to do, and he's got the knack of disarming his attackers- and I don't mean that he charms them.
It's going to get worse. We need to be able to discern the attacks that have a damaging potential from the ones that are glancing blows that won't hurt the candidate. The trick is to figure out which is which.