cognitive dissident

Greg Sargent at TPM has the scoop (h/t: Andrew Sullivan) on Barack Obama’s response to the right-wing smear job that he allegedly attended a radical Islamist madrassa while living in Indonesia as a child:

Insight Magazine published these allegations without a single named source, and without doing any independent reporting to confirm or deny the allegations. Fox News quickly parroted the charges, and Fox and Friends host Steve Doocy went so far as to ask, “Why didn’t anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised — spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father — as a Muslim and was educated in a Madrassa?”

All of the claims about Senator Obama raised in the Insight Magazine piece were thoroughly debunked by CNN, which, instead of relying on unnamed sources, sent a reporter to Obama’s former school in Jakarta to check the facts.

If Doocy or the staff at Fox and Friends had taken [time] to check their facts, or simply made a call to his office, they would have learned that Senator Obama was not educated in a Madrassa, was not raised as a Muslim, and was not raised by his father – an atheist Obama met once in his life before he died.

Later in the day, Fox News host John Gibson again discussed the Insight Magazine story without any attempt to independently confirm the charges.

All of the claims about Senator Obama’s faith and education raised in the Insight Magazine story and repeated on Fox News are false. Senator Obama was raised in a secular household in Indonesia by his stepfather and mother. Obama’s stepfather worked for a U.S. oil company, and sent his stepson to two years of Catholic school, as well as two years of public school.

[…]

To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago. Furthermore, the Indonesian school Obama attended in Jakarta is a public school that is not and never has been a Madrassa. [emphasis added]

Maybe the Democratic Party will have a candidate in 2008 who refuses to be Swiftboated by the MSM smear merchants. As Sargent wrote:

This is exactly the right thing to do: Take these guys on very aggressively, and above all, single out by name the people who are lying about you. Wrap their lies around their necks.

Let's hope we see lots more of this. [emphasis in original]

MediaMatters has the backstory on the original (Moonie) Insight Magazine article, the CNN debunking, and Insight’s attempt to pin the blame on Hillary. The National Council of Churches has issued a statement on the smear attempt (h/t: StreetProphets) which is worth reading, especially where it condemns the “false and malicious attacks” on Obama as being a “despicable tactic” of “slash and burn politics.”