Note: I'm the author of a new book, Barack Obama: This Improbable Quest, but I'm not part of the Obama campaign.
Halloween is a time of fraudulent fright, where people in masks try to scare you into giving them what they want. It’s the perfect Republican holiday. So, to mark this special day and the list of 1,117 lies and smears about Obama which I put together on www.truthobama.com, here’s my list of the top scariest liars who have spread the best smears about Barack.
I must give Honorable Mention to a few people who didn’t quite make the top ten list. Stanley Kurtz, the National Review purveyor of smears about Obama and ACORN, and his own self-aggrandizing persecution complex where he imagines that Barack Obama is trying to destroy him. David Freddoso, the author of a best-selling book full of lies. Brad O’Leary, the author of another shoddy book smearing Obama (and whose lies in his book I detail at TruthObama.com). Jack Cashill, who claims that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s memoir. Floyd Brown of ExposeObama.com (and Willie Horton fame).
All of them are worthy of being on any list of liars and professional smear artists. But here are my top ten for the scariest liars of them all this election season.
#10. Jed Babbin
As editor of Human Events (and deputy undersecretary of defense under W.’s daddy), Babbin deserves recognition for helping me pad my list of lies with plenty of extra smears. But he makes this list thanks to his column yesterday proclaiming that "Barack Obama will be our first French president." Obama as French? After using this sleazy Francophobia against John Kerry, you have to admire the conservative commitment to recycling.
Babbin’s previous columns include a fantasy of violence breaking out after Obama loses, and even during election season, he made time to interview the author of a pro-Confederacy interpretation of the Civil War.
But what really gets Babbin his place on this list is the final paragraph of his Oct. 30 column:
Anyone who still doubts Obama is culturally (and probably genetically) French should consider this statement by the Illinois naïf: "My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join me as we try to change it." Who but a Frenchman could have uttered those words?
There’s only one problem with this powerful indictment of Obama: it’s all fake. As FactCheck.org noted, "People who keep circulating this ‘idiot quote’ could easily discover that it is false. It was debunked by Snopes.com, the urban legends site, back on March 15, and a simple word search using Google or any search engine quickly brings up the truth of the matter."
#9. Investor’s Business Daily
Investor’s Business Daily makes the Wall Street Journal editorial pages seem thoughtful and moderate. IBD has produced numerous editorials featuring falsehoods about Obama’s law school career. The newspaper is fond of denouncing Obama’s plans to promote voluntary community service in vile, insane terms: "the Obamas . . . plan to herd American youth into government-funded reeducation camps where they'll be brainwashed into thinking America is a racist, oppressive place in need of 'social change.'"
IBD also has made bizarre, racist attacks on Obama: "At the core of the Democratic front-runner's faith ... is African nativism." IBD asks, "Would Obama put African tribal or family interests ahead of U.S. Interests?" and also had attacked "his Muslim past."
IBD loves to smear by association, even when there’s no association: "he's using the playbook of Yasser Arafat."
Oddly, IBD is treated as a credible source for information. (RealClearPolitics lists the pro-McCain tracking poll of right-wing wackos like IBD, while refusing to include the DailyKos/Research 2000 tracking poll.)
#8. Dick Morris
This toe-sucking scumbag was the punchline to many jokes, but astonishingly, conservatives (especially at Fox News) still take this discredited political consultant seriously. I detail his numerous lies on TruthObama.com. Even before Obama started running for president, Morris was lying about his record. On January 17, 2007, Morris claimed that Obama, voted against "a Senate reform banning the increasingly widespread practice of legislators hiring their family members on their campaign or PAC payrolls." Obama actually voted for the reform, and Morris was forced to retract his error. Unfortunately, Morris has continued to lie about Obama. He co-authored the best-selling book, Fleeced, which only includes one chapter on Obama but manages to be riddled with factual errors and bad writing, and occasionally the combination of both, such as this claim (page 14): "He one [sic] would weaken the standards Bush imposed for improved public education."
Morris is prominently featured in the anti-Obama documentary "Hype," where he is the most prolific liar among a large number of competitors. Morris makes various lies about Obama’s tax plan and even claims that doctors will be banned from providing health care under Obama: "it's okay for him to perform an abortion, but if he gives you that bypass, he's going to lose his license."
#7. David Bossie
Bossie is the head of Citizens United, a far-right group which was started in 1988 to run the infamous racist "Willie Horton" ads against Michael Dukakis. Bossie is back trying to smear Barack Obama with a series of false ads and a feature-length documentary called "Hype" which repeats numerous lies about Obama and his record that I’ve documented in detail.
#6. Sarah Palin
She’s the new kid in smear school, but boy does she learn fast, dontcha know. Her enthusiasm for telling lies is what really sets her apart from the typical Republican. Of course, she began by lying about herself, pretending that she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere and posing as Miss Maverick (somehow ignoring how she was a director of the "Ted Stevens Excellence in Public Service Inc." 527). But Palin has quickly made Obama the primary target of her propensity to lie.
Palin declares at every stop, "Barack Obama voted 94 times for higher taxes." It’s a lie that’s been discredited long ago by multiple sources. (Palin doesn’t mention that by this same standard, McCain has voted for higher taxes at least 477 times.)
Palin claims, "Unlike Barack Obama, John McCain will not support cutting off funding for troops in the war zone"–-indifferent to the fact that McCain had also voted against a funding bill, or that none of these votes would ever endanger the troops.
According to Palin, "To withhold medical intervention for a baby who is born alive as a result of a botched abortion and to allow that child to die without the medical intervention that that child deserves, it's appalling to me and I think it should concern voters."(Sarah Palin, interview with Christian Broadcasting Network, Oct. 21, 2008) The Washington Post fact checker noted, "it is unfair to accuse Obama of supporting the withdrawal of medical treatment from babies born as the result of a botched abortion. He has never adopted such an 'extreme' position."
Palin proclaims, "We need a leader with truthfulness"(Oct. 31) while she spreads a seemingly endless list of lies about Obama.
#5. Jerome Corsi
Corsi’s book attacking Obama hit the top of the best-seller list, despite the enormous number of lies and errors that I (and others) found in it.
Corsi is a genuine nutcase, and even wrote a book about his belief that George W. Bush is trying to destroy America by merging it with Mexico and Canada. Since his Obama book, Corsi has been pushing the insane belief that Obama’s birth certificate is a fake.
#4. Sean Hannity
Sean Hannity is the leading promoter of sleaze on cable news talk shows, and his name appears throughout my list of 1,117 lies and smears about Obama. His Hannity’s America program pushed some bizarre conspiracy theories about Obama, including the anti-Semite Andy Martin’s view that Ayers has been secretly controlling Obama for decades as part of a covert plot for revolution. Hannity also uses the "Hannity & Colmes" show to spout the usual lies about Obama, and Hannity also has a radio show where he spouts nonsense like claiming that Obama's proposal "for rescinding the Bush tax cuts" would result in "families of four that make $50,000 a year ... paying another $2,000 in taxes a year."(July 9, 2008)
#3. Rush Limbaugh
My TruthObama.com list included 100 lies and smears by Limbaugh (#170-#269), and I’ve detailed his lies before. Limbaugh has pushed some astonishingly stupid theories on his show, including the idea that Obama is using hypnosis on people, and that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s memoir.
Limbaugh has made openly racist attacks on Obama, calling him a "halfrican American" and a "half minority" and a "little black man-child." Limbaugh bizarrely claimed without any evidence that Obama, who graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard Law School as president of the Harvard Law Review, received preferential grading because of his race and "probably didn’t get out of Harvard without affirmative action."
#2. John McCain
I used to respect John McCain, and I never imagined that he would end up near the top of a list of liars. But he’s here for his remarkable transformation during this campaign. For a man who likes to talk about honor, it’s astonishing how little of it he’s had in this campaign. McCain was victimized by right-wing smear artists and robocalls in 2000—and then turned around and hired the very same sleazebags to help run his campaign.
In his ads and his own speeches, McCain has repeatedly lied about Obama and his record. He promised to run an "honorable" campaign and instead gave us one of the most dishonest, smear-filled campaigns in the history of American politics. Deliberately distorting Obama’s views and resorting to the worst guilt-by-association smears imaginable, McCain has forever destroyed his reputation in this campaign.
#1. Andy Martin
Martin deserves hall of fame honors for his long career of lunacy. And nobody has been smearing Obama longer than Martin, or with less attachment to reality. The self-appointed Executive Director of The Stop Obama Coalition, Martin is also founder of The Committee of One Million to Defeat Barack Obama and author of "Obama: The Man Behind The Mask."
Few can match his devotion to not telling the truth. As I revealed in my book, Martin was the original source for the "madrassa" myth about Obama attending an Islamic school in Indonesia.
Martin is an unending source of smears. This week, he proclaimed, "Andy Martin explores the relationship between Barack Obama and anti-Semites." (Martin was repeating a fantastic, discredited smear that a guy named al-Mansour had financed Obama’s law school education and arranged to get him admitted.) Certainly, no one can doubt Martin’s expertise on the subject of anti-Semitism, since he has a remarkable record of hateful remarks (such as "crooked, slimy Jew") toward Jews that he explains away by declaring, "I was the innocent victim of both a political kidnapping and a burglary by corrupt federal judges in Chicago."
Today, Martin writes on his website, "Is there a secret Obama, and an ‘Obama Code,’ author Andy Martin asks." That’s the kind of inexplicable paranoia about Obama that we’ve all learned to love from Martin.
These supreme smear spreaders may seem scary, but what’s really frightening is the fact that they’re not alone. There are swarms of conservative talk shows and websites where the lies about Obama get repeated with the same indifference to the truth, and even in the mainstream media there is little effort to debunk these lies and many times the smears are actually repeated without the truth being told. My list of 1,117 lies and smears is just the tip of the iceberg, and we all need to get the truth out.
Crossposted at ObamaPolitics.