Courtesy of Sam Stein, here's a double dose of crazy and bigoted:
Last Friday, a Republican National Committee woman Kim Lehman, responding to an article about the polls in Politico, accused the publication of trying "to protect Obama" by denying his true religious heritage.
"BTW he personally told the muslims that he IS a muslim," wrote the Iowa RNC member. "Read his lips."
...
Reached on the phone Monday, Lehman stood by her initial tweet, arguing that it was during his speech that Obama let the real truth slip.
"I was watching television when he was over there talking to the Muslim world and he made it, in my opinion, clear he was partially Muslim," Lehman told the Huffington Post. "The way he was approaching that speech was, 'Hey I'm one of you. I'm with you.' He didn't have to say that... but he did."
As Stein points out, President Obama actually said he was a Christian in the speech:
Now part of this conviction is rooted in my own experience. I'm a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk. As a young man, I worked in Chicago communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.
Despite Democratic panic from Howard Dean to Harry Reid, it's become ever more clear that Republicans are overplaying their hand. Like Gollum drawn to the ring, they can't help themselves. With the rare but notable exception, not a single Republican has stood up to denounce this sort of bigotry -- and now it's coming, in its looniest form, from members of the party's own central committee.
The question now is whether there is anybody inside the GOP with the stature and the moral clarity to get the conservative movement to abandon its orgy of hate mongering -- or whether this will end up consuming the party though the November elections.