CT Blue

The Republicans have a playbook that has become all too familiar. For many of their tricks to work, they need a compliant, and sometimes, a cooperative press. Eight years ago they claimed that Al Gore said he had invented the internet. Gore never said that, but the press repeated the charge, accepted it as true, and to this day most people in this country probably believe he said it.

Given the success of that smear job, it’s no wonder the Republicans keep trying the same tactic. Recently, they totally misrepresented a remark that Obama made about the Middle East:

In an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., talked a great deal about Israel. He was rather effusive in his support for the Jewish state.

Apparently given nothing of substance to criticize, House Republican leaders then took a statement Obama made and twisted it to act as if the Democrat had insulted the Jewish state. Which he had not.

…

Then he said: “But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy. The lack of a resolution to this problem provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, and so we have a national-security interest in solving this, and I also believe that Israel has a security interest in solving this because I believe that the status quo is unsustainable. I am absolutely convinced of that … I want to solve the problem…”

It seemed pretty clear to me that by “constant sore” Obama was referring to the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As he says in the next sentence: the “lack of a resolution to this problem.”

Nonetheless, House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, who knows better, accused Obama of calling Israel a “constant sore.”

“Israel is a critical American ally and a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, not a ‘constant sore’ as Barack Obama claims,” Boehner said. “Obama’s latest remark, and his commitment to ‘opening a dialogue’ with sponsors of terrorism, echoes past statements by Jimmy Carter who once called Israel an ‘apartheid state.’”

Jeffrey Goldberg, the reporter that conducted the interview, has condemned Boehner’s remarks as “mendacious, duplicitous, gross, and comically refutable.” (That’s a long winded way of calling Boehner a liar).

None of this pushback, however, means that this line of attack won’t have legs. It fits too neatly into the unfolding “Obama is a secret Muslim Hamas loving scary black man” narrative that McCain has been pushing. The fact that the guy who did the interview has rejected the charge means nothing; so far as I know, the reporter who did the interview of Gore never endorsed the charge. There is no reason to think that Fox won’t push this story, on one just like it. If we learned anything from 2000 and 2004 it is that attacks like this need a full scale counter-attack. I very much hope Obama knows that, or else we may find ourselves with a President McCain next year.