Conservatives falsely accused of starting and spreading rumor/smear about Michelle Obama
Your Monday morning outrage:
Google “Michelle Obama” and the term “whitey” and you’ll find conservative bloggers claiming a video shows her using the racially tinged term at Trinity Church. No tape has ever surfaced. But the claim helped prompt the Obama campaign to launch its own Web site, FighttheSmears.com.
As Jim Geraghty points out here, it wasn’t any conservative blogger who started and has been actively spreading the rumor about the “whitey” videotape, it was Hillary Clinton supporter and foaming-at-the-mouth liberal Larry Johnson, who has written no small number of posts devoted to this rumor, who has claimed that numerous “Republican sources” are telling him it exists. In fact, it is conservative bloggers who have been debunking this story as baseless. Has Barack Obama’s “Fight The Smears” website given any credit to these conservative bloggers? No. Instead, his “Fight The Smears” website blames Republicans for starting and spreading this rumor. Furthermore, when Johnson is mentioned on the FTS site regarding the alleged tape, it isn’t noted that not only is Johnson a liberal, but also a rabid Hillary Clinton supporter. Clearly the “smearing” here isn’t just related to a rumor about Michelle Obama, but by Obama’s own “fact check” website for trying to pin all this on the right.
Johnson, I should note, is a hero to many on the far left for how he as a former CIA agent came out swinging against those who supposedly “leaked” Valerie Plame’s CIA status to the public. The Democrat party was entranced enough by him to allow him to deliver one of their weekly radio addresses in the summer of 2005. He’s also the same jerk who said the following about Karl Rove in the summer of 2006:
Karl is a shameless bastard. Small wonder his mother killed herself. Once she discovered what a despicable soul she had spawned she apparently saw no other way out.
Shortly after that, he was caught engaging in gay-baiting by accusing a conservative blogger he didn’t like (because he could debunk Johnson’s nonsense so well) of being a “latent homosexual” who had a “man-crush” on GWB.
Knowing all that, the far left’s embrace of him should be no surprise. It also should be no surprise that now, when a number of news outlets are falsely claiming this smear campaign was started by conservative bloggers, that – to my knowledge – none of the liberal bloggers who have been disgusted by Johnson’s campaign have courageously stepped forward to say who the real culprit was in all this in an effort to tamp down on this rumor once and for all.
Apparently in Liberal Media World, the only evil people out there are conservatives who can’t win on the issues but instead have to rely on “smear tactics” in order to win elections. Liberals, on the other hand, would never do such a thing.
As Malkin noted in her link above, ABC News invited people at the end of their article to submit the facts they knew about this story, and provided a link to do so. I’m getting ready to submit to them my .02 about this smear against conservatives, and I hope you will, too.
Via Memeorandum.