Obama Isn't . . . Is He?

[UPDATED]

Barack Obama got hit today with a front-page Washington Post piece that's nothing more than an excuse to spread false rumors. Here are the first couple of paragraphs:

In his speeches and often on the Internet, the part of Sen. Barack Obama's biography that gets the most attention is not his race but his connections to the Muslim world.

Since declaring his candidacy for president in February, Obama, a member of a congregation of the United Church of Christ in Chicago, has had to address assertions that he is a Muslim or that he had received training in Islam in Indonesia, where he lived from ages 6 to 10. While his father was an atheist and his mother did not practice religion, Obama's stepfather did occasionally attend services at a mosque there.

Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a "Muslim plant" in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year.

The rest of the story goes down from there. Obama is put into the position of denying something that everybody agrees never was true in the first place. But the whispers get people to pay attention to the rumor, and it digs its claws into people's subconsciouses whether they're aware of the truth or not.

It's surprising that the Post is unaware of this fact, but this is just an example of how the right-wing smear machine works. (Yes, that's just me being "ironic" again. Of course the Post knows how the game is played, and of course they act like such an idea has never occurred to them.) As long as this is a subject of front-page coverage, the rumor stays alive and continues to undermine Obama.

The worst part about this article is that, although they admit Obama's a member of a United Church of Christ congregation right at the top, they spend the rest of the article acting as though the Muslim rumor is still an open question. We're given the fact that 45 percent of people in a Pew Research poll would not vote for a Muslim. (How is that relevant when he's a Christian?) We've got Obama aides who "sharply disputed the initial stories." Isn't that what one does with untruths? We've got history of who's been spreading the rumors. (Surprise! It's right-wing media.) We've got right-wing talkers repeating the debunked rumor. (Which is what they do--they're not interested in finding the facts, they're just pushing their agenda.) And we've got examples of Websites where this rumor has been repeated, including "another e-mail, on a site called Snopes.com that tracks Internet rumors." Snopes.com doesn't track rumors, it (mostly) debunks and (occasionaly) verifies them. Here's the actual Snopes link. You tell me whether it merely repeats the rumor or extensively rebuts it.

How are we ever going to have informed voters or even reasonable issues-based political discussions when the mainstream media insists on distilling even verifiable facts down to a he-said/he-said? (Yep, that's a rhetorical question. We all know the real answer.)

UPDATE--In Friday's Washington Post, Tom Toles adds to the fun with another Obama rumor we should maybe get started.