Let the sliming begin -- Part Cinq

Obama's a Mooooossssliiimmm. Or he's a wacky radical black Chris'shun. Or sumptin'....

But the media isn't giving up on the "Mooooooossssliiimmm" thing, even after they managed to get the pastor of his Christian church to drop out of his campaign.

Eric Boehlert has the nuts and bolts:

Less than one second. That's how long it took Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton to answer, "Of course not," to Steve Kroft's question on 60 Minutes about whether she thought Sen. Barack Obama was a Muslim. You can time it yourself by watching the clip at YouTube.

Still, that didn't stop MSNBC's Chris Matthews from complaining on-air last week that it took Clinton "the longest time" to answer Kroft's question.

Lots of eager, tsk-tsking pundits and reporters agreed. They said Clinton was guilty of "hemming and hawing" in response to Kroft's peculiar, repeated insistence that she make some sort of declarative statement about her opponents religious beliefs. And then when she did, Kroft asked that she do it again. That's when Clinton, looking befuddled by the multiple requests, added some qualifiers to her response, including "as far as I know." What stood out in the exchange was not Clinton's responses, but Kroft's weird persistence in asking a question that Clinton addressed unequivocally the first time, as though he was trying to draw out something she was not saying. Even more peculiar was Kroft's obsession with the Muslim question amid a 60 Minutes report that was about Ohio's shrinking working class and what Clinton and Obama were going to do to try stop of the overseas flow of U.S. manufacturing jobs. (Note to Kroft and the rest of the media: Obama is not a Muslim; Clinton knows Obama is not a Muslim; Clinton does not believe Obama is a Muslim. Clinton made this very clear.

Of course, they can do double-duty by trying to pin the blame on Hillary Clinton:

After parsing Clinton's answer and then conveniently setting aside key sections of it, journalists at NBC, MSNBC, The New York Times, Chicago Sun-Times, Time, The New Yorker, and The Washington Post, among others, declared her response had been wholly deficient. Worse, Clinton's answer simply confirmed that she was running a "slimy," "nasty" contest. It was a "galling" comment; "the sleaziest moment of the campaign."

The only thing sleazy about the episode was the type of journalism being used to concoct a Clinton slur.

When people suggest that the press employs a separate standard for covering Clinton, this is the kind of episode they're talking about. There simply is no other candidate, from either party, who has had their comments, their fragments, dissected so dishonestly the way Clinton's have been.

The fact is, if you look at Clinton's exchange with Kroft in its entirety, which lasted less than one minute, I count eight separate times in which she either plainly denied the false claim that Obama was Muslim, labeled that suggestion to be a smear, or expressed sympathy for Obama having to deal with the Muslim innuendo.

Neat getting both memes out there, pandering to the unwashed xenophobes of the RW and at the same time attacking Clinton....

How about talking about McCain? You know, like, about his "rustic cabin"?!?!?


Update

I suppose I can't leave out mention of the "Jeremiah Wright scandal", flogged 24X7 by the likes of FauxSnooze, Hannity, and Limbaugh.... They've even managed to get some "liberals" ducking for cover and demanding that Obama repent from his heresy-by-association ... which is exactly what the RW is trying to goad Obama into doing, but which he should not do (and in part for that very reason).

Glenn Greenwald has a good article with some good discussion on his blog.

And Obama has come back with a rather good speech.

We'll have to see what washes out in the end.

But nice to see that the RW is getting into a more honest and straight-forward form of race-baiting....


Update 2

Atrios weighs in: CNN's carrying someone's water.