Blogs For Victory

The Union Leader in New Hampshire has a great editorial pointing out how Barack Obama’s attacks on John McCain in recent weeks have had no resemblance to the truth.

In the past few weeks, Obama has thrown so many false accusations against John McCain that just keeping track of them has become difficult. And these aren’t innocent errors. They are deliberate distortions of the sort Obama has always said he reviles.

On Thursday, Obama said of McCain, “He has consistently opposed the sorts of common-sense regulations that might have lessened the current crisis.” That’s entirely untrue.

As The Washington Post pointed out in an editorial on Friday, McCain in fact has supported many new regulations of financial institutions, including some that Obama opposed. “In 2006, he pushed for stronger regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — while Mr. Obama was notably silent,” The Post wrote.

And why, perhaps was Obama silent on that issue? He was only taking hundreds of thousands in donations from Fannie Mae and Freddia Mac… but you probably didnt’ hear about that from Obama..

Obama attacked McCain for having a top financial advisor who supported a deregulation bill a few years ago. Yet two top Obama financial advisors, with whom he met on Friday to help him form his response to the current troubles on Wall Street, supported the same bill, which was signed by President Clinton.

Also last week, Obama released a Spanish-language ad that portrayed McCain as anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic and tried to link him to immigration policies that were not his own as well as some choice Rush Limbaugh quotes that appeared to insult Mexicans.

Anyone who has followed the immigration debate knows that McCain is the most pro-immigration Republican on the national stage and that he is not in the least anti-Hispanic. To pull quotes from Rush Limbaugh, who has completely different immigration views than McCain and who opposed him on that issue for years (and still does) is completely disingenuous. The ad is so bad that even The New York Times called it “misleading.”

And you know if the New York Times is willing to concede Obama is a big fat liar, than you know it’s one hell of a whopper he was trying to pull.

There’s also this one here, relating to the ad McCain put out a couple weeks ago that Obama decried as false, when it in fact was true.

Obama’s campaign also accused McCain of lying when McCain’s campaign ran an ad saying that Obama supported sex education for kindergarteners. But the bill in question, which Obama supported in the Illinois state Senate, did indeed change state law to allow sex education for kindergarteners.

Katherine, over at our McCain blog, is encouraging people to contact FactCheck.org to get them to admit their original assessment of the McCain ad was indeed wrong, and calling for CNN to retract their statements on the ad as well.

Could Obama’s negativity and lies backfire on him? Indeed they could.

Obama has said that he won’t attack John McCain’s motives, only his policies. But he has repeatedly attacked McCain’s motives, suggesting that he has been bought off by oil companies and lobbyists.

Obama’s greatest strength as a candidate, aside from his oratorical skill, has long been his apparent sincerity and decency. Voters attracted to him think of him as that rarest of things: an honest politician. He has claimed himself that he would never engage in the sort of deceptive politicking that he says has tainted Washington for so long.

Yet here he is violating his own professed standards. This is not the Barack Obama so many voters in New Hampshire and elsewhere thought they knew. But it is the real Barack Obama. For despite his rhetoric, he is in fact campaigning so dishonestly that even The Washington Post and The New York Times have called him on it. Which means that he is in practice no different from those regular politicians against whom his entire campaign has been built.

Barack Obama has been encouraged by his party in recent weeks to step up his attacks…. unfortunately for Obama, his heeding this call forces him to contradict his self-made brand of a new kind of politics. His so-called politics of hope and change now appear to be the politics of fear, lies, and the same old politics as usual.