Fed up with all the nasty rumors, Barack Obama and his campaign have set up fightthesmear.com, a website devoted to zapping the recalcitrant untruths that have been dogging him for months, especially online.
Clearly Obama is acknowledging the necessity of addressing, rather than ignoring, the growing number of virulent online rumors that have repeatedly received wide attention despite a lack of establishing evidence.
Topping Fight the Smear's four-item list is the canard that Michelle Obama used the word "whitey" in a speech at her church. The site marks this as a lie, saying, "No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word."
This is more a denial than a fact-filled rebuttal, but it has the effect of putting the Obama campaign on the record about the issue, whereas it had declined to comment before. You would suppose that if there had been any truth to it, a flat-out denial would not have been a good idea. I wonder whether this will finally satisfy commentators like Larry Johnson, who took Obama's refusal to comment on this rumor as evidence of its veracity.
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