FactCheck.org Doesn't Bother Going Far Enough Anymore

I've always liked the website FactCheck.org - they were the first "fact checking" site that concentrated on the sometimes outrageous claims made by politicians and political parties. I referred to them often when writing for National Review Online's "Sixers" blog and AOL's election blog "The Stump". In the past year or two, however, I've noticed that they have been quite a bit harder on the GOP - sometimes unfairly so. I've written several e-mails correcting their false and misleading claims, ironic because they are supposedly the "fact checkers", but no corrections have been forthcoming. I've come to the conclusion that their shift from being remarkably non-partisan to being somewhat of a "truther" for the Left happened at about the same time Vivica Novak took over, but it's possible that it had been planned long before and that her arrival was a mere coincidence.

Their latest expose (Sliming Obama) of some truly revolting e-mails about Barack Obama that have been circulating is a perfect example of this. In part of their analysis, they correctly attribute reports of Obama attending a radical Muslim Madrassa to an article in Insight magazine, a right-wing publication. But they mislead by stopping there, committing the sin of omission, by insinuating that the Insight started the rumors.

In fact, the Insight article states clearly that the info that they got on Obama's Muslim 'connections' came from connections inside Hillary Clinton's campaign - that she, in essence, was responsible for researching and spreading it.

Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?

This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama.

An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia. Sources close to the background check, which has not yet been released, said Mr. Obama, 45, spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.

If that was the extent of it, then it's basically "he said, she said", and that would be the end of it - although the Hillary connection should have been clearly noted by FactCheck.org in their 'expose'. But if one takes the time to Google this subject, which I assume FactCheck.org did, you'll quickly find out that that's not the only thing that connects Hillary to those rumors and e-mails.

There was another well publicized recent event, happening at the beginning of December '07, connecting Hillary's campaign directly to those e-mails that seems to support Insight's allegations in their article that the FactCheck.org crew couldn't possibly have missed, unless they intentionally did so. Here's a quote from an article on this (HILLARY VOLUNTEER SENDS ANTI-OBAMA EMAIL) on MSNBC.com:

The liberal-leaning blog TPM is reporting that the Clinton campaign has "acknowledged that an Iowa county chair volunteering for the campaign passed along the now-notorious email" that repeats "the false claim that [Obama] attended a madrassa as a child." This comes a day after the Clinton campaign charged the Obama camp with dirty tricks and making rude phone calls to Clinton supporters.

According to TPM, the charge originated from a Dodd supporter, who wrote on the DailyKos blog that he received an email from "a Clinton county chair," who repeated the Obama-is-a-Muslim-and-was-educated-in-a-madrassa story.

Two things. First, the Insight article clearly states at the beginning of their article that the Obama story was coming from the Clinton camp. Second, not only was a Clinton County Chair in Iowa fired for spreading the same story several months later, so was another Clinton campaign worker. Those are dots that don't take much intelligence to connect.

And FactCheck.org didn't report these very relevant facts because...?

More importantly, and with apologies to Alan Moore and the upcoming film "The Watchmen", who watches the watchers?