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Below the Belt

by Conservativity Staff,
Originally Posted: 9/16/2008 11:02:02 AM

Barack Obama has run a whopper of a campaign ad.  The gist of the ad is that John McCain is a senile old geezer who doesn’t even know how to send emails from his computer.  As many other authors have noted since this disgraceful story broke, Mr. McCain, by virtue of his war wounds, cannot use a computer keyboard without extreme pain.  This is a fact that took us conservative bloggers only a few moments of Googling to discover.  Moreover, the imputation of the ad, that John McCain is a technologically-inept dolt, is a complete lie.

Jonah Goldberg wrote this op-ed about the ad, noting a few inconvenient truths about John McCain.  As Mr. Goldberg writes,

In 2000, Forbes magazine called him the "Senate’s savviest technologist." That same year, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg gushed that McCain was the most "cybersavvy" of all the presidential candidates that year, a crop that included none other than Al Gore. Being chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, Weisberg explained, "forced him to learn about the Internet early on, and young Web entrepreneurs such as Jerry Yang and Jeff Bezos fascinate him."

Mr. McCain has been on top of the technology issues of the day, notwithstanding his war wounds, for many years.  Mr. Obama’s staff either did not care to fact-check Mr. McCain’s war wounds or his technology background, or they knew it and chose to lie.  So much for taking the higher road in this campaign.  Mr. Obama, as Mr. Goldberg aptly notes, "is a candidate who has never had to sell himself to voters who weren’t already sold."  And now that he’s losing, Mr. Obama’s phony veneer of integrity and civility is out the window.

Has Mr. Obama fired the campaign workers who disseminated the ad?  No.  Therefore, we must acknowledge that Obama has endorsed the ad and its lies and implications.  Mr. Goldberg notes that Obama’s ad insults and slanders senior citizens, and that will come back to haunt him.  I agree, and add that, as Mr. Obama falls further and further behind Mr. McCain, in his desperation to win, he will resort to more falsehoods to try to separate Mr. McCain from his supporters.  However, Mr. Obama’s publicity arm, a/k/a the mainstream media, have already discredited themselves in attempting to lambaste Sarah Palin, leaving Mr. Obama without a credible means to prop up his lies.  The blogosphere will fact-check Mr. Obama into oblivion.  Good.

Barack Obama, welcome to our hall of shame.