Obama Dishonesty Takes Political Attacks to New Depths

There are a lot of allegations of dishonesty currently bubbling up along the campaign trail, and neither side of the political spectrum is without some dirty laundry.

But today's controversy over Barack Obama's Spanish-language attack ad calling John McCain an intolerant bigot represents a new stage in the social construction of postmodern presidential campaigns.

Rush Limbaugh, at today's Wall Street Journal, demonstrates that Obama has distorted his words to attack the GOP nominee:

I understand the rough and tumble of politics. But Barack Obama - the supposedly postpartisan, postracial candidate of hope and change - has gone where few modern candidates have gone before.

Mr. Obama's campaign is now trafficking in prejudice of its own making. And in doing so, it is playing with political dynamite. What kind of potential president would let his campaign knowingly extract two incomplete, out-of-context lines from two radio parodies and build a framework of hate around them in order to exploit racial tensions? The segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s were famous for such vile fear-mongering.

Read the whole thing for Limbaugh's devastating indictment of Obama's hypocritical deceit.

But check out Captain Ed as well:

Barack Obama miscalculated when he took Rush Limbaugh out of context for a Spanish-language ad that attempted to paint John McCain as a racist, for about the sixth time in this campaign. Not only was the ad completely and transparently dishonest — McCain and Limbaugh are far apart on immigration policy — but it used lines from a parody about immigration policy so far out of context as to make Obama a liar.

To top off your reading pleasure, Jeff Goldstein puts Obama's lies in the context of post-structural linguistics:

... what is important here is that the Obama campaign ... by extracting excerpts from Limbaugh’s monologues and applying them to a new context — without reference to the original context — they have pretended that the purported “arguments” being made by Limbaugh speak in opposition to their own claims of postracialism. But in fact, just the opposite is true, as Limbaugh himself recognizes. Because for Limbaugh’s signs [statements] to acquire the meaning the Obama camp wants viewers to take away from their presentation, those signs must be entirely severed from their original intent. And it is only at that point – when the interpretative process is left up to the intentions of a receiver who has naught but the signifiers to go on, thanks to the dishonest and intentional removal of all the indexes to original intent that occur inside the signified context of the utterer ... that one can argue that Limbaugh’s piece “means” what the Obama camp suggests it means.

The bold italics are mine.

I'll be waiting (and waiting...) for the outrage on the left.

John McCain's enemies have made out the McCain/Palin ticket to be the dirtiest presidential campaign in modern history, even worse the "Tricky" Dick Nixon. Yet, honestly, the scale of the left's wicked campaign of deceit and demonization against John McCain and Sarah Palin literally is unprecedented in modern presidential politics.