Videos & Blog

Colbert Report: President Palin

If executive experience is so important, shouldn't Sarah Palin be at the top of the ticket?

The Daily Show at RNC: First Night

Aasif Mandvi: "The Republicans will buy your house!" Video inside...

Lieberman hearts Obama: "He is a baruch... a blessing"

After hearing Lieberman attack Obama and lie about his record at the RNC, it was fun to rewatch this clip:

 

McCain Campaign Calls JewsVote.org "Cynical"

Ben Smith at Politico has an interesting article up about the possibility that Sen. McCain's selection of Gov. Sarah Palin will shift they vote in the Jewish community. The consensus is that it won't McCain at all. The only question is how much will it hurt?

Understatement of the article:

Her thin record was underscored when the staunchly loyal Republican Jewish Coalition e-mailed its members evidence of her support for Israel: a video in which a small Israeli flag can be seen poking out from behind a drape.

"I think it speaks volumes that she keeps an Israeli flag on the wall of her office," the group's executive director, Matt Brooks, told Politico in an e-mail.

JewsVote was mentioned as well:

Also Tuesday, a new Jewish Democratic group, JewsVote.org, sent out an email under the heading “Who is Sarah Palin?” an echo of conspiratorial anti-Obama emails that have criss-crossed the Jewish community.

“Given her record as a hard-right Christian conservative, her embrace of Pat Buchanan, her praise of Ron Paul, and her lack of credentials on foreign affairs, it is likely that her selection would raise serious red flags about the McCain/Palin ticket among Jewish swing voters,” they wrote, asking their members to send out their own anti-Palin emails.

McCain aide Goldfarb called the email “unbelievably cynical—fighting smears with smears."

A smear is defined as an effort to deliberate spread damaging rumors about someone else. A rumor is a story unsupported by the facts. For example, the email I received yesterday, claiming that Michelle Obama's senior thesis in college contains evidence of Ms. Obama's anti-white views is a rumor. It is untrue; in fact, the person who created the email KNEW that it was untrue, which is why he or she pretended to have pulled the story from the Snopes fact-checking website. Pretended... because the actual text on the website came to the opposite conclusion.

Our emails do not contain any rumors. Our emails are not smears. They are the often uncomfortable truth about Sarah Palin's views, positions, and actions. The fact that they are, as Ben writes, "anti-Palin" does not make them untrue. Facts which, many of the people quoted in Ben's article notes, do not sit well with most Jews.