Let’s say you are in charge of one of the major newspapers in the country. A standard barer, if you will. The campaigns are heating up, and so is your coverage. The world keeps turning, with peace talks in the Middle East and capture of some guys that killed some chick some years ago that we all used to obsess over but don’t care about now. And The Patriots are having a mind-blowing undefeated season, to boot! So what do you decide to run on page A1?

Oh, oh, I know! Let’s retread some old crap about Obama a month before the first caucus! Yeah!

First of all, we’ve already debunked this. Twice. But that’s not what makes this article by Perry Bacon (if that is your real name) so shockingly bad. It may stand alone as one of the worst piece of journalism ever written, and would easily have been forgotten in the school newspaper of Backwater High if it weren’t on the front page of the Washington Post.

Let us start, class, by looking at the title:

Foes Use Obama’s Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him.

Since when are “rumors” front page material for a major news paper? I’ve got a rumor for you:

Ron Paul Son Of Bat Boy And Lobster Girl!

Can I have a job writing for WaPo now? First paragraph:

In his speeches and often on the Internet, the part of Sen. Barack Obama’s biography that gets the most attention is not his race but his connections to the Muslim world.

Gets the most attention from whom? It turns out Perry Baconlinks means, and quotes, a select few loonies on the extreme right wing fringe of the Internet — and then bolsters his claim that these people are a majority of some sort by name dropping Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh without attributing anything more than innuendo to these better known names.

Furthermore, and quite randomly, the article quotes a recent poll showing that “people,” by which we infer “Americans” and not “pod people,” don’t want Muslims in politics. Which is a striking bit of information in the middle of an article about how Obama’s not a Muslim. At least it would be, in Upside Down World.

But this might be considered nitpicking. It’s true that the lies about Obama’s religion and background persist on the Internet and occasionally bleed over in to the mainstream media — but that’s what makes this article, in particular, so fucking infuriating. Rather than state outright the undeniable truth that Obama is NOT a Muslim, Perrywinkle Bacon presents his story as though this is still in dispute, and is something worthy of debating on page 1 of The Washington Post. He brings up Insight Magazine and the Madrassa story from January and provides Obama’s denial as the lone and sole refutation, completely leaving out the CNN report where they actually went to the school and actually talked to people and actually proved this rumor as a lie. This does a disservice to the readers of The Washington Post by not giving them a full and accurate story.

Baconbits doesn’t debunk the “rumors” in a straight forward manner at all. He never says “Obama is a Christian who came to his faith on his own in his 20’s.” Instead, it is stated that he attends a Christian church and that he denies the “rumors,” but they don’t expound on that.

If you need any further proof of the bias inherent in the article, check out this little bit of word count fun:

27 instances of the word Muslim

5 instances of the word Christian

8 instances of the word rumor

0 instances of “false,” “lies” or “allegations”

At the very least, I think it’s crystal clear that Perrymason Bacon needs a damn thesaurus. Oh, and that title? “Obama’s Muslim Ties?” Turns out he doesn’t have any.

Bravo, WaPo.  Luckily, you publish every single day, so maybe you can get a better writer for tomorrow.  One with a thesaurus.  One who isn’t a xenophobe.

This isn’t mudslinging, and it isn’t dirty politics, but it is really, really childish.

Now voters will judge whether living in a foreign country at the age of 10 prepares one to face the big, complex international challenges the next president will face… I think we need a president with more experience than that. Someone the rest of the world knows, looks up to and has confidence in.

It’s physically impossible to roll my eyes enough at this one. Here’s a hint: A lot of people think hosting dinner parties at tax-payer funded houses is also not enough qualification to be President. Luckily, Obama spokesperson Bill Burton is a lot nicer than I am.

Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have spent time in the White House and traveled to many countries as well, but along with Hillary Clinton they led us into the worst foreign policy disaster in a generation and are now giving George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran… The real choice in this election is between conventional Washington thinking that prizes posture and positioning, or real change that puts judgment and honesty first.

Oh, Robert Novak, how we’ve missed you and your douchebaggery.

Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party’s presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, but has decided not to use it. The nature of the alleged scandal was not disclosed.

Now, granted, this is a three paragraph blurb in Novak’s syndicated column, going on to say that Clinton is taking the high road and not stooping to name calling. However, I call bunk. There is no way Novak could know something and not print it. It’s physically impossible for him. In fact, if someone told him they know a secret (say, that an ex-Ambassador is married to a CIA operative) and they do not willingly disclose what that secret is, Robert Novak will shove his fist in to their chest, rip out their still beating heart, hold it over his head and loudly proclaim I WILL EAT YOUR SECRET and have it to his editor before deadline. It is his nature.

Obama responded via Politico:

The Obama statement begins: “During our debate in Las Vegas on Thursday, we heard Sen. Clinton rail against the politics of ‘throwing mud.’ At the very same time, in Washington, Robert Novak was publishing a column in which he reported the following: ‘Agents of Sen. Hillary Clinton are spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent for the party’s presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama…’ ”

The statement continues: “The item did not identify these ‘agents,’ nor did it reveal the nature of the charge. It was devoid of facts, but heavy on innuendo and insinuation of the sort to which we’ve become all too accustomed in our politics these past two decades. If the purpose of this shameless item was to daunt or discourage me or supporters of our campaign from challenging and changing the politics of Washington, it will fail. In fact, it will only serve to steel our resolve. But in the interest of our party, and her own reputation, Sen. Clinton should either make public any and all information referred to in the item, or concede the truth: that there is none.”

Clinton’s camp feigns ignorance, as usual. Mark Ambinder at The Atlantic comes through for us again, identifying a report from
John Fund in the OpinionJournal.com:

The murmured charge is that as an Illinois state senator, Mr. Obama engaged in a real estate deal that benefited him in exchange for legislative favors. In short, what might pass for standard operating procedure in the Illinois legislature could nonetheless prove embarrassing to someone campaigning as a paragon of political virtue for president. So far, however, no proof of the allegation has been presented.

Wait — haven’t we already debunked this?

There’s a new distortion floating around, so it must be a day ending in “day.” Obama’s being accused of attacking Clinton about her records while not releasing his own.

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Barack Obama, who’s been scolding Hillary Rodham Clinton for not hastening the release of records from her time as first lady, says he can’t step up and produce his own records from his days in the Illinois state Senate. He says he hasn’t got any.

“I don’t have - I don’t maintain - a file of eight years of work in the state Senate because I didn’t have the resources available to maintain those kinds of records,” he said at a recent campaign stop in Iowa. He said he wasn’t sure where any cache of records might have gone, adding, “It could have been thrown out. I haven’t been in the state Senate now for quite some time.”

Obama’s statement that he has no papers from his time in the Illinois statehouse - he left in 2004 - stands in stark contrast to the massive Clinton file stored at the National Archives: an estimated 78 million pages of documents, plus 20 million e-mail messages, packed into 36,000 boxes. While any file from Obama’s time in the state Senate would be far smaller, the idea that no papers exist at all is questioned by one historian.

Wait wait wait little apples and oranges, stop right there. Obama himself didn’t keep any papers, personally. Neither, in fact, did Clinton. His papers from his time in the State Senate are with the State of Illinois. Her papers are with the National Archives. No one has insinuated Hillary Clinton cough up personal papers, just the papers that are required by law to be kept by the National Archives for future release to the public.

This became an argument because the Clinton’s specifically asked the Archives to set aside all correspondence between Bill and Hillary for review prior to release.  Obama has authorized the release of his State Senate papers, and he responded to this stupid “controversy” on Meet the Press:

“In the state Senate, every single piece of information, every document related to state government was kept by the state of Illinois and has been disclosed and is available and has been gone through with a fine-toothed comb by news outlets in Illinois.

“The stuff that I did not keep has to do with, for example, my schedule. I didn’t have a schedule. I was a state senator. I wasn’t intending to have the Barack Obama State Senate Library. I didn’t have 50 or 500 people to, to help me archive these issues.”

Hillary Clinton’s entire campaign hinges on the idea that she is qualified to be President because she was deeply involved in policy as First Lady, but refuses to release her papers showing how involved she was with policy while First Lady. And let’s not forget that those papers are in the NATIONAL ARCHIVES.

All we’ve learned here is that Obama is not a packrat and Hillary is really bad at the Ad Hominem Tu Quoque fallacy.

While we’re at it, I’m going to start a meme, right here, right now, demanding to see Biden’s 10th grade math tests and for Dodd to fess up and tell us, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, if Carrie Fisher was any good in bed.

In the “let’s nitpick for lack of any substantive criticism” category:

At a town hall meeting Wednesday an Iowa voter asked Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill., about the numerous emails she has received with photos purporting to show Obama “refusing” to pledge allegiance to the flag.

Here’s the picture in question:

Such a non-issue, since the e-mail going around is factually wrong.

“This was not during the pledge of allegiance,” Obama said of the picture taken at Senator Tom Harkin’s, D-Iowa, annual steak fry and first published by Time. “A woman was singing the Star Spangled Banner when that picture was taken.

“I was taught by my grandfather that you put your hand over your heart during the pledge, but during the Star Spangled Banner, you sing!” Obama said.

There’s a video from the event here. Snopes has a write up, too, in case you feel the need to know the exact Flag Code (hint: no one in the photo is following it.)  However, the point still stands that this was not the pledge of allegiance.

Obama gave an interview to The New York Times on October 27 outlining how he would more forcefully point out the differences between himself and Senator Clinton. The Clinton camp pulled out the same tired soundbite the always do whenever Obama stands up to explain how he’s different:

Asked about Mr. Obama’s remarks, Mrs. Clinton’s spokesman, Howard Wolfson, said: “Senator Obama once promised Americans a politics of hope. But now that his campaign has stalled he is abandoning that strategy and is engaging in the same old-style personal attacks that he once rejected. We are confident that voters will reject this strategy, especially from a candidate who told us he would do better.”

They say this exact same line so frequently I think they must have it on a broken record somewhere. This time, Obama responded:

“I’ve been amused by seeing some of the commentary out of the Clinton camp, where every time we point out a difference between me and her, they say, ‘What happened to the politics of hope?’ which is just silly,” he said, laughing.

Asked why it was silly, he responded: “The notion that somehow changing the tone means simply that we let them say whatever they want to say or that there are no disagreements and that we’re all holding hands and singing ‘Kumbaya’ is obviously not what I had in mind and not how I function. And anybody who thinks I have, hasn’t been paying attention.”

Kumbaya, Senator. Goon Feather gets to the nitty-gritty:

He needs to hammer the fact that pointing out differences isn’t the same as negative campaigning again and again.