McCain smears now coming fast & furious

The Obama campaign has articulated pretty clearly lately how it feels about Fersatz News, our State TV Network. On Monday, Matt Drudge, who functions as the assignment editor for our right-wing corporate media, ran with another phony news story - this time it's about what Barack Obama allegedly said about the Supreme Court during a 2001 interview. First, what he actually said:

You know if you look at the victories and the failures of the Civil Rights movement and its litigation strategy in the Court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I would be okay.

But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And to that extent as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn't that radical, it didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and the Warren Court interpreted it in the same way that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties says what the states can't do to you, says what the federal government can't do to you, but it doesn't say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf and that hasn't shifted.

And one of the I think the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court focused I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change and in some ways we still suffer from that.

This is a far cry from how the right, led by Drudge and the McCain campaign, has been spinning what Obama said. Fortunately, the Obama campaign isn't letting the lies and smears go unanswered; they are responding swiftly and firmly, just as they should. Bill Burton, an Obama spokesman, appeared on Fox on Monday to talk about the allegations:

This is a fake news controversy drummed up by the all-too-common alliance of Fox News, the Drudge Report and John McCain, who apparently decided to close out his campaign with the same false, desperate attacks that have failed for months. In this seven-year old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all. Americans know that the real choice in this election is between four more years of Bush-McCain policies that redistribute billions to billionaires and big corporations and Barack Obama's plan to help the middle class by giving tax relief to 95 percent of workers and companies that create new jobs here in America. That's the change we need, and no amount of eleventh-hour distractions from the McCain campaign will change that.

Very well said - this is one of the many last- gasp, pathetic attempts to distract voters from the real issues by McDrilly's dying campaign, but it certainly won't be the last; McCain's handlers no doubt have plenty more tricks, misinformation and lies up their sleeves.

Honestly, every time I hear McCain or Palin talk about "spreading the wealth around" or "wealth redistribution" or "class warfare," I can't help but hope that Obama throws this right back in his face. What he really needs to do is force McCain to defend wealth concentration, which has risen to new heights under the Bush administration. Obama should go on the attack and force both of these economical morons to defend how the top one percent of wealthy Americans control 90 percent of the wealth in this country. Good God, would I love to hear their answers.

Actually, I'm guessing we'd just hear crickets.