Author Michael Chabon responds to today's WaPo article by Richard Cohen, who attempted to smear Obama with the words of his church's magazine in support of virulent racist and anti-Semite Louis Farrakhan. Cohen's attack - which could've been handed over as a press release from the Clinton campaign - deserves the rebuttal:
Alas for Mr. Cohen and for all of us, in the service of his own fear he resorts to employing the time-honored strategies (smear and guilt-by-association) and tactics (a false appearance of reasonableness, assumption of unproven conclusions, selective reference to facts not in evidence) employed by the very demagogues and masters of hate whom he is presumably trying to combat. Why has there been no response from the Obama camp to this deeply troubling message of hate?
Well, as it turns out, there has been a response -- at least two of them -- and Mr. Cohen even quotes them in his column. Since they interfere with his crucial business of frightening himself and the rest of Jewish America (not to mention the quotidian duty of filling one's allotment of column-inches), however, he ignores them. In so doing, Mr. Cohen resorts to a time-honored principle of propagandists of hatred: Every denial is in fact tantamount to a confession.
There are plenty of reasons to oppose Barack Obama - but suggesting he is an anti-Semite without any basis, and with plenty of evidence to the contrary, really is a new low.