The right wing media had been breathlessly anticipating the release of a tape/video where Michelle Obama supposedly lashes out at "Whitey" and Clinton for all kinds of things, and yes, it was supposedly from the family church.
At least one Hillary supporter had also warned about it.
This tape was supposed to appear a few days ago and to land the final blow to the Obama campaign, coupled with the theme that he limped to the finish line. I guess it did not happen. Maybe because it was a hoax, but this garbage is all over the place.
Andrew Sullivan's site offers enlightenment on this:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.co...
Over the weekend CNN reported on some of the widespread myths about Obama--the pledge of allegiance thing, Muslim, Madrassah, etc. CNN reporter Rick Sanchez wondered aloud whether bringing these myths to light was tantamount to spreading them. The trouble was that in repeated introductions to the upcoming story, he repeated the myths as if they were facts. That does tend to spread the rumors. But I agree that as widespread as these are, they need to be addressed. One way to do it could be to remind people that McCain was the victim of this kind of stuff eight years ago, and that's how we ended up with Bush. And that instead of lamenting that, and suggesting that a McCain record would have been different, McCain has embraced the Bush record.
Another way is what David Sirota said about this on CNN, that this is all the GOP has this year.
The New Yorker magazine has an article by Jeffrey Toobin about the dirty tricks tradition of the GOP. The trickster says that McCain has to do this kind of thing to win. Read that here:
http://www.newyorker.com/...
There are several ironies here. First, McCain would probably have won the GOP nomination in 2000 were it not for the Bush "dirty tricks" in South Carolina. Second, Hillary lost a lot of African-American support in South Carolina eight years later because of what some saw as her husband's "dirty tricks" there. Third, McCain may have to embrace these kinds of tactics in order to win in 2008, whereas a President McCain since 2000 would likely now be looking at eight years of a very different record for the GOP, and Jeb Bush might be inheriting that record for a run this year.
The final irony is that Democrats used to have the advantage in the prankster department such that Richard Nixon famously remarked that his party needed to develop a "Dick Tuck capability". I know it sounds like a reference to Democratic candidates' sexual prowess, but Dick Tuck was a Democratic prankster who plagued Nixon and the Republicans way back when.