More on the smear.

Obama hate: another wave by Earl Ofari Hutchinson

Team Obama’s rage at the New Yorker’s inflammatory cover illustration depicting the presidential candidate as a Muslim and his wife as a terrorist went beyond ballistic. Even Republican rival John McCain expressed anger at the magazine.

But illustrator Barry Blitt’s point that the ridiculous rumor-mongering, gossip, slurs, and flat-out falsehoods about Democrat Barack Obama’s religion, patriotism, birth, and, of course, race, are deep and widespread is horribly true.

Even more frightening is that those slanders may touch a nerve in an unknown but frighteningly large number of voters.

That danger was there from the start, and there were packs of Web sites ready to deepen that danger. Obama had barely finished his announcement for the presidency in February 2007 when the Web site Barack Exposed popped up on every search engine. Put up by Human Events, a fringe, ultraconservative outfit, the site promised to expose the “truth” about Obama, from his alleged role in corruption scandals to, of course, the signature hit item, his patriotism.

At the time, the nonsense was rightly laughed off as a typical smear and slander by one of the pack of ultraconservative hit squads. But the laughter didn’t last long.

Obama’s breakout win in January in the Iowa caucuses instantly marked him as the Democrats’ potential presidential go-to guy. It also set off alarm bells among the blog hit squads, birthing such sites as AntiObama.net, Stop-Obama.org, AudacityOfHypocrisy.com, NobamaNetwork.com, and many more.

The anti-Obama bile, complete with scurrilous, doctored photos of him as a Muslim terrorist, is the staple on many of the sites and is repeated as a sickening mantra by the Obama character maligners.

Obama’s White House bid has virtually breathed new life into the unabashedly white supremacist group Stormfront’s site. The group claims to get about 40,000 hits a day

Google belatedly realized that its engine was rapidly becoming a top conduit for spreading the anti-Obama rumor-mongering hate and shut down several of the more blatant anti-Obama sites. Warnings that any site that engaged in slathering Obama with vicious personal slurs would be promptly shut down drew some mild criticism that Google was stifling free speech.

But the right to propagate malicious slander and lies hardly qualifies as a free-speech protection, let alone legitimate political criticism.

There were early warning signals of the online ugliness that could come. Radio talk-show gasser Rush Limbaugh, quoting a columnist, called Obama “Barack the Magic Negro,” then parodied the candidate in a related song to the tune of “Puff the Magic Dragon.” The message was clear that Obama was not exempt from a racial dig.

That was much evident in the short-lived furor over Obama’s former Chicago church, and the controversial outbursts of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright. The inference was that Obama’s guilt by church membership and friendship with Wright made him a closet radical and a race baiter.

But long before the Wright controversy broke in the national media, more than a few of the anti-Obama sites had a field day lambasting him and Wright. The nitpicking continued on the most trivial things such as his chain smoking and his admitted flirtation with drugs as a young man.

There also were pokes at his wife, Michelle, as outspoken, bossy and America-hating. This slander against her has been almost as popular on some Web sites as calling Obama unpatriotic and implying that he’s a closet Muslim terrorist.

The great danger is that the lies and maliciousness fanned by the Obama slander sites could, or have, had resonation with some voters, especially the much-fought-over independents. They make up about a quarter of the electorate, and the overwhelming majority are white and centrist to conservative in their views.

The fear that the rumors could hurt prompted the Obama campaign to take the unprecedented step of putting up an anti-smear Web site to counter the lies. It also prompted Obama in January to do a teleconference call with Jewish reporters to refute that he was a Muslim.

The New Yorker’s editors may have wanted to show the absolute vileness and absurdity of the rampant slanders about the Obamas. But the magazine, which is the nation’s staid bastion of highbrow culture and thinking, inadvertently, if not deliberately, imprinted the damaging slanders in the thoughts of even more unknown voters.

In that way, the magazine did the same as the legion of dirt-dealing Obama blogs.

And it’s not just the moonbat bloggers.  Corporate radio talk show host and convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy says that The New Yorker  “finally got it right.”

(Cartoon copyright 2008 by Tony Auth/Philadelphia Inquirer)