Enough is enough

Hillary, don't think we weren't listening this past Saturday. You're 'suspending' your campaign?!?! Concede already! Obviously you're plotting to lay low until August when you sneak into Denver and as Obama takes the stage to officially accept his nomination, you announce the reactivation of your campaign. Ingenious, but not democratic. Anonymous yet loyal reader, go here to join the millions of your fellow patriotic citizens who have already signed a petition calling on Hillary to quit...


















...just kidding. Seriously though, I thought her Saturday concession speech was one of her best. It was gracious, eloquent...etc. But most importantly, she didn't friggin' mention the trite, and not totally true argument about her having won a majority of the popular vote. I applaud her for that.

Granted, she could have helped us all out by giving this speech the Tuesday before--instead, she made that pathetically delusional appeal to her fatigued voter base asking that they go to her website to offer their advice. Say whaaaa?!?! Anyway, she's out and we can finally focus on making the best case possible for our guy against a Republican challenger that, besides going off the deep end a couple years back to court those few remaining Bushies out there, is a loose cannon that could blow at any moment.

This brings me to my first point of the general election cycle: Obama's latest effort to debunk those nasty "right-wing" smears that simultaneously stir up totally unfounded rumors about his record and clutter our spam filters, needs some serious work.

In case you haven't heard, earlier today, the Obama campaign created the website "Fight the Smears," to, well, fight the smears. None of the "smears" featured on the site are any that we haven't already been seeing nonstop over the last 16 months. With the general election officially underway, the campaign was wise to take the bold move of directly and aggressively calling the right wingers out on their nonsense. Kerry's noble effort to try and defend his war record weeks after it had been unfairly, and as it was later proven, totally falsely, torn apart by the infamous Swift Boat campaign, was too little too late. From then until November, Kerry's main line of attack--unlike Bush, he could be proud of having honorably served his nation during the Vietnam war, both as a soldier and later as a voice of dissent in the Winter Soldier talks--was rendered useless. He lost the smear war. Point is, it's encouraging that Obama doesn't seem willing to make the same mistake and the unveiling of this site is certainly a testament to his fighting spirit.

But, there's something not quite right about the whole thing. Obviously, like he wisely did at the peak of the Rev. Wright fiasco, he won't and can't be expected to address every rumor leaked by the right's spin machine, in a carefully worded and prophetic lecture. However, if he really finds it necessary to spend his campaign's energy putting these lies to rest--I'm not totally convinced of this considering how childish and conspicuously fictitious some of the rumors are (OK, so maybe I'm displaying a certain amount of faith in the American people's ability to call out bullshit when they smell it, sue me)--he certainly shouldn't half-ass it. Firstly, in its current form, the whole thing reeks of being way too defensive. By only listing snappy one liners to quell the outrageous rumors, the site risks allowing the campaign to fall into the right wingers's vicious trap of a futile back and forth that does little more than distract Obama from his real mission: to prove why he's our country's best hope of being able to revive our domestic and international rep.

Secondly, and perhaps more urgently, the terse "Truth" that corrects the unfounded claim that Obama is a Muslim is down right offensive. In response to lies that he is a crypto Muslim, the site reads: "Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian." That's it, nothing more. Nothing about his family past that includes a grandfather who died a devout Muslim, and a father who was raised so until converting firmly to atheism. Nothing. Nothing about the importance of not treating every Muslim like a potential terrorist; a sentiment he first famously expressed in his ballsy 2004 DNC speech. But more than anything, there's nothing that simply says "Look, not that there's anything wrong with being Muslim, but we want the facts to be straight and the fact is that Obama is Christian." That's all it would really take, a simple yet reassuring caveat. As it stands, him being a Muslim is to be taken like any of the other three absurdities featured on the site; not only is it a lie, it is one that represents something Obama is fundamentally opposed to and therefore, must be corrected.

Obviously, you all and myself wouldn't be backing this guy if this is how he truly felt. For this reason, the site needs to be totally scrapped and only reappear once the petty one liners are replaced with substantive and more honest responses that do more than just play "he says she says" with McCain and his right wing smear team. Because we ought not to forget that, like Obama, the hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world deserve to have their name (and record) honored and treated with respect.

Obama, respect yourself and the public and stop treating your Muslim heritage like a dirty little secret. As long as you do, so will we.

And by the way, hat tip to you, Sarah, for catching this.