The Obfuscation Report

And since Fox follows the Bush administration's golden rule "when you're in a hole, dig faster," they've also gone after CNN's Anderson Cooper for calling them on their lies. Hilariously, Fox spokesperson Irena Briganti demeaned Cooper's reporting ability and called his correction of Fox's errors "a cry for help." Coming from a network whose sole purpose is whining, Cooper should take this as unvarnished praise.

The Obama lies are a model for the off-key moaning of the right's media machine. Fox ran the lies on two shows, and plastered it on Papa Murdoch's king of yellow journalism, the New York Post. From there it was picked up by right wingnut talk show hosts who pitched in to keep the swift boats sailing. This included Dan Caplis, who not only repeating Fox's false accusations about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but adding his own dash of nuttery by calling Obama's elementary school a "Muslim seminary."

As usual, no one on the right seems to be interested in facts when they've got a good character assassination underway, especially if they can sling mud at Obama and Hillary at the same time. Stopping now would be slander interruptus.

Weighing in today Barack Obama's office delivered his own verdict on the Fox follies.

"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.

To think, some folks actually laughed when Hillary first talked about the "vast right wing conspiracy." Her office also provided a comment on the affair.

"This is a textbook example of how the other side works. A right-wing rag makes up a scurrilous charge and prints it with no real attribution. The smear gets injected into the atmosphere and picked up by talk radio. In this case both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton were victimized."