E-mail from the opposite corner

[Brian]

I asked Jeanne to send me an attachment she got from Pat across the street at the end of September but only read half of it. It was dispiriting, like listening to Rush Limbaugh all night while cramming for an exam on Nixon's campaign strategies, but I got through the part about William Ayers. A few days later, the New York Times wrote its front page examination of Obama's encounters with Ayers in the Chicago political -- and charitable -- scenes of the mid-1990's. And the same day, Palin made Pat's treatise, not the Times story, the red meat in her stump speech.

McCain, Palin and, presumably, Limbaugh repeated the same stuff Pat had gathered for two to three weeks about Ayers and ACORN. Then they had to stop. Obama's poll numbers rose.

So I just read the entire revision from Pat -- the "final version" of his white paper, "Do you have friends like these?" -- that Jeanne forwarded last weekend, yet I can't tell without side-by-side scrutiny what's different. It's still full of innuendo and Islamic foreboding, with conclusions like this:

Quite frankly, this is simply not believable.

Polite as you can be when you think that MALDEF is a dangerous organization.

There are any number of angles in addressing this kind of political tract, as old as our nation and as fresh as the John Birch Society, and I'd welcome any discussion of them.

[Jeanne Lavieri]

Thanks, Brian for doing that reading. I couldn't quite get through it. But I read enough to pick up on the innuendo and fear mongering. BTW, the author's name is Marc Pierce.