Right Wing Readies Attack Machine

Regardless of the Democratic nominee, the right wing attack machine is gearing up to spin its lies of web and deceit. Gotta hand it to them, though, they are good at telling the lies, aren't they? Which Democratic candidate can best withstand the attack? According to Robert Parry at Consortium News that would be Barak Obama and his superb oratorical skills.

Over the past few years, the Right has continued to pour tens of billions of dollars into its media infrastructure – ranging from books, magazines and newspapers to talk radio, cable news and the Internet – while the Left still resists any comparable media investment, leaving its few outlets – like Air America Radio – to struggle along under-funded.

So, one of the few certainties of Campaign 2008 is that whoever is the Democratic nominee can expect a full-scale barrage of Republican attacks, anti-Democratic “oppo” injected into the public debate.

This has been a pattern for the past two decades, from 1988 when the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times spread false rumors about Michael Dukakis’s mental health to 2004 when Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News raised doubts about John Kerry’s Vietnam War heroism.

If the pattern holds, the anti-Democratic themes also will resonate through the mainstream media, which is conditioned to picking up attack lines from the Right, partly as a defense against accusations of “liberal bias” from conservative anti-press organizations.

Given this right-tilted asymmetry, the Democrats have little choice but to make the question of vulnerability to Republican smears a factor in their nominee selection process. The euphemism for this assessment is called “electability.”

Some observers argue that the certainty of Republican assaults should favor Clinton over Obama (because the Clintons already have been “vetted” and Obama is a fresh target). But that analysis may not be entirely accurate.