Targeting Right Blogs

A few weeks ago, on Sunday, June 1st, I started getting hits to this blog from Larry Johnson’s No Quarter – maybe ten hits in an hour which is real weird for a Sunday in June. I tracked them back to this page about the infamous Michelle Obama “Whitey” tape. At first I didn’t think anything of it, but the hits kept coming and I couldn’t find the link here on that page. It’s actually a blogger trick to get folks to pay attention to your posts, so I kind of brushed it off. But then I started seeing other bloggers picking up on it – kind of skeptically, though. Nearly everyone questioned the veracity of the story – me, I never heard of this Johnson guy before. But I did know he had a really bad haircut.

Anyway, I mentioned the links in a comment by zero ponsdorf and COB6 immediately perceived  it as some sort of dirty trick. At Ace of Spades, I made the comment that I had the feeling that the Right blogs were getting set up, and someone asked me how we could get set up when no one writing much about it. On it’s face, that’s a reasonable question. No one was writing much about – except to make fun of Larry’s hair (someone called him Flo-Bee Johnson…hilarious).

Then on Tuesday, June 3rd, Bob Beckel came out and on Fox News and perpetuated the rumor that something was coming out soon.

Than this last Saturday, I read in the New York Times that “the final straw for Mr. Obama, his aides said, was the story circulating on conservative blogs that a video existed showing Mrs. Obama making a racially tinged speech at their former church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.”  Huh? What conservative blogs were those? The only place I saw it was on Larry Johnson’s blog.

Well, this morning, I checkout Little Green Footballs to see what those guys on the Left Coast talked about while I was sleeping and I find this.

UPDATE at 6/15/08 5:37:50 pm:

My jaw has just dropped.

Beckel had the nerve to blame the “whitey tape” smear on right wing bloggers. Wow. A new apex of hypocrisy has now been achieved.

UPDATE at 6/15/08 5:42:17 pm:

Beckel actually claimed that he tried to debunk the rumor. Here’s the video clip, courtesy of Hot Air. Sleazy, sleazy, sleazy.

Yeah, you need to go to LGF and see both clips – And of course, we’re a bunch of “crackers and rightwingers” according to Beckel. Even though he and Johnson were the only ones spreading this rumor, it’s our fault.

And I just went over to Larry Johnson’s and find that he’s still trying to perpetuate the rumor that Obama isn’t an American citizen…something neither COB6 nor I questioned when the crap was flying around in the middle of last week.

I defer to Baldilocks on questions of Obama’s citizenship and childhood. And my source for his political career are the infallible Chicagoan duo of Backyard Conservative and Marathon Pundit.

But anyway, we, the blogs on the Right, did nothing, yet apparently we’re to blame for lefty clintonista Flo-Bee Johnson spreading the rumor of the “Whitey” video.

From James Taranto’s “Best of the Web” Friday, there’s a link to an Obama ’08 page called “Fight the Smears” which lists four rumors about Obama that are “lies” and they provide documentation. It’s not real important stuff – it includes the Whitey tape, the rumor of which,  the Obama campaign claims, was started by Rush Limbaugh. Yuh, huh.

Actually, the Fight the Smears page isn’t new – it’s been on the campaign website for more than a month and it was directed at the Hillary campaign, but now it includes Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity as it’s targets.

So the message is “Don’t believe the blogs and radio folks on the Right and here’s why…” Nice try.

Category: Bloggers, Media, Politics