Guilty by Ann Coulter Page B

favorably on the Democratic candidate. That is the point of all their wailing about “smears” from the Republican Attack Machine: Republicans should not be allowed to talk. If Republicans make any argument against a Democrat, they are said to be engaging in personal attacks. If telling voters the facts about Democrats constitutes an “attack,” then maybe there is such a thing as a Republican Attack Machine. Most people call it a “tape recorder.”
    In an aggressive move, the media, in tandem with the Obama campaign, began debunking patently preposterous slurs that no one else had heard. To great applause from the media, for example, the Obama campaign launched a website in June 2008 called “Fight the Smears” in response to this purported deluge of false and defamatory information about him and his wife coming from mysterious Republicans. The imaginary slurs were all thematically related to actual facts about Obama. So by loudly defeating a handful of ridiculous claims about him, the media covered up his undeniable problems. The myth of a Republican Attack Machine victimizing Democrats had once again been used to preempt meaningful debate on real issues.
    Needless to say, the only smears debunked on Obama's website had already been thoroughly shredded, day in and day out, throughout the media. In fact, the only way anyone had heard of the alleged smears was by hearing them debunked. In all its glory, the famous Republican Attack Machine had produced a few Internet rumors that, even if untrue, were more fact-based than the things the media routinely say about Republicans.
    We were repeatedly told, for example, of right-wing smears that Obama was a Muslim. This was particularly ungrateful, in light of the fact that conservative TV and radio host Sean Hannity had done more than anyone else in America to publicize Obama's “Christian” pastor, Reverend Wright. Moreover, when liberals thought no one else was listening, they boasted of Obama's Muslim background, citing it as a reason to vote for him. In a much-heralded article in the
Atlantic Monthly, 51
liberal Andrew Sullivan wrote:
    The Republicans and independents who are open to an Obama candidacy see his primary advantage in prosecuting the war on Islamist terrorism.
It isn't about his policies as such; it is about his person….
    What does he offer? First and foremost: his face.
Think of it as the most effective potential re-branding of the United States since Reagan. Such a re-branding is not trivial—
it's central to an effective war strategy….
There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.
    Consider this hypothetical. It's November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.
A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy.
If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama's face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.
    Liberals gleefully cited the fact that Obama “attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy” as a reason to vote for him—it will make our enemies love us! But some Americans didn't want our enemies to love us; they would prefer that our enemies fear us. Why weren't they allowed to cite the very same fact—that, as a boy, Obama attended a majority-Muslim school? It's a peculiar form of political debate that allows the exact same information about a candidate to be used if it is given as a reason to vote for him, but constitutes a hate crime if it is cited as a reason not to vote for him.
    Sullivan touted the benefits that would