Dejavu

[marmar]

Published on
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
by CommonDreams.org


The Clinton Smear Campaign Against Obama
by Stephen Zunes


Unable to find much that Barack Obama himself has said or believes that is particularly alien to the thinking and values of most Americans, Hillary Clinton and her supporters in the media have chosen instead to engage in a campaign of guilt-by-association.

Not surprisingly, right-wing media pundits and prominent Republicans have thrown their weight behind Clinton's efforts, taken advantage of the New York senator's attacks to smear the likely Democratic presidential nominee. For example, North Carolina Republicans are readying a television ad on the eve of that state's primary which includes a photo of Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright together, a video clip of Wright making incendiary comments, with a voiceover telling voters that Obama is "just too extreme for North Carolina."

Clinton's guilt-by-association campaign has even moved to additional degrees of separation. For example, before tens of millions of viewers of the April 16 debate in Philadelphia, Clinton again brought up Obama's alleged "relationships with Louis Farrakhan," despite Obama's repeated and unequivocal denunciations of anti-Semitic statements and other controversial actions by the Black Muslim leader. The apparent extent of Obama's alleged "relationship" with the Nation of Islam leader which prompted Clinton's charge was that a magazine for which Obama's pastor's daughter serves as publisher granted an award to Farrakhan in honor of a successful program he had set up to rehabilitate ex-convicts.

During that same debate, Clinton went so far as to link Obama with the radical Palestinian Islamist group Hamas because the "pastor's pages" section of the weekly bulletin of the church Obama attended once included -- as part of a series of opinion pieces reprinted from various newspapers around the country -- an op-ed column from the Los Angeles Times written by a Hamas leader. Though Obama had already categorically condemned the decision to reprint that article, Clinton told the tens of millions of viewers that "we have a choice who we associate with and who we apparently give some kind of seal of approval to," such as the pastor who -- in Clinton's typically hyperbolic version of events designed to discredit her rival -- was guilty of "giving the church bulletin over to the leader of Hamas."

Hillary Clinton has even attacked Obama for having served on the board of the Chicago anti-poverty group known as the Woods Fund at the same time as former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers. Ayers, who was never convicted of any crime, is now a distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois-Chicago and served as a former aide to Mayor Richard M. Daley. Clinton apparently saw it as irrelevant that, at the time of Ayers' involvement in the Weather Underground, Obama was just eight years old and living nearly ten thousand miles away in Indonesia. ..................(more)

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2008/04/30/clinton-smear-campaign-against-obama

[morningfog]

1. This is who she is. Tigers don't change stripes.

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, marmar.

[WillyT]

3. HUGE K & R !!! - Thank You !!!