In response to an Obama smear passed along by email, which contained this write-up by Bill Levinson:

Because of talks that I’ve had with friends, I’ve been grappling with the Obama/Israel issue for a few weeks now. And the more that I, a Gentile, explore the issue, the more I realize that being an outsider is going to prevent me from understanding many of the emotions that are at work here. Ultimately, this is a discussion that needs to happen among members of the Jewish faith. But I still felt like I needed to work some of my thoughts out, for my own sake if not for anyone else’s.

Getting just an initial glimpse of the comments, accusations, and insinuations that have been made against Obama reminded me of one of my favorite, if not my absolute favorite, political quotations: "Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof." John Kenneth Galbraith said that, and it holds true a million times more often than it’s proven wrong.

Nothing that I can say is really going to change Bill Levinson’s mind even though he admits that “We do not, to the best of our knowledge, know of any racist or anti-Semitic statements that Obama has made himself.” Similarly, if any opposing voice is going to be attacked as viciously as Levinson attacks Ira Forman, a fellow Jew, I don’t stand a chance here. If my audience is someone who truly thinks that Samantha Power is part of the problem, as people are now saying, and not part of the solution, this is pointless. And if you equate any kind criticism of Israel with “hate speech” and hold American politicians to a higher standard of “support” than you might find among liberal members of Israel’s Knesset, I’m wasting my time.

But don’t listen to me. Levinson wants us to listen to his list of nine writers/pundits/bloggers, so let me counter with my own list of nine: William Daroff, vice president of United Jewish Communities; Nathan J. Diament, director of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America; Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League; Richard S. Gordon, president of the American Jewish Congress; David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee; Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center; Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; Phyllis Snyder, president of the National Council of Jewish Women; and Hadar Susskind, Washington director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs.

These nine Jewish leaders signed an open letter in January condemning the type of smear that Levinson is promoting. They wrote:

As leaders of the Jewish community, none of whose organizations will endorse or oppose any candidate for President, we feel compelled to speak out against certain rhetoric and tactics in the current campaign that we find particularly abhorrent. Of particular concern, over the past several weeks, many in our community have received hateful emails that use falsehood and innuendo mischaracterizing Senator Barack Obama's religious beliefs and who he is as a person.

These tactics attempt to drive a wedge between our community and a presidential candidate based on despicable and false attacks based on religion. We reject these efforts to manipulate members of our community into supporting or opposing candidates.

Attempts of this sort to mislead and inflame voters should not be part of our political discourse and should be rebuffed by all who believe in our democracy. Jewish voters, like all voters, should support whichever candidate they believe would make the best president. We urge everyone to make that decision based on the factual records of these candidates, and nothing less.

A tenth Jewish American, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, calls this the “Thinking Man’s Madrassa Smear.” Seven more, all of them sitting U.S. Senators and none of whom have endorsed Obama, condemned these smears as well. These guilt-by-association tactics, far from looking to set the record straight about Obama, have their origins in a political agenda that looks to keep Obama from winning the presidency in November – nothing more.

At least four of Levinson’s nine are political hacks: Charles Krauthammer is a neoconservative columnist that has supported the Bush administration through thick and thin; Kenneth Blackwell was the Republican nominee for Governor of Ohio in 2006 and honorary co-chair of the “Committee to Re-Elect George Bush” in 2004; Ed Lasky wrote in 2004 that Jews “must vote for Bush”; and Debbie Schlussel is a bitterly partisan Republican voice reminiscent of Ann Coulter.

All four of these opponents – perhaps more, I didn’t do any in-depth research on them – are trying to get you to vote Republican in 2008. This is a page out of the classic Republican playbook, much like the issue of abortion. These people know that the subject of Israel is one that arouses great passions in many, many people and they want to use these passions to their electoral advantage. Once your vote is cast, their interest in the issue will lay dormant until the next election/fundraiser rolls around. They’re betting that you won’t do any of the legwork required to refute their claims.

And again: they’ve got nothing incriminating, no racist or anti-Semitic statements that have come from Obama himself. It’s all about the church he attends, the politicians he’s photographed with, the other people that attend the political functions that he does. Don’t you think, if Obama did indeed have some sinister motive in mind, that he would have articulated it at some point? Maybe in his first book, written years before he even imagined that he’d hold public office? Yet there is nothing, and Levinson admits it. Perhaps the absence of evidence wasn’t a problem for Donald Rumsfeld, but we should hold ourselves to a higher standard.

The insinuation and guilt-by-association tactics don’t hold up to much scrutiny, either. There are 77 million Catholics in the United States, and, as we know there are no shortage of priests and church officials who denounce abortion and homosexuality. Do you think all 77 million agree with them? Probably not. But do those 77 million keep going to church every week? Probably. Because it’s not really about what the guy at the front of the Church is saying – it’s the man he’s preaching about, Jesus Christ. If everyone sitting in our churches, synagogues, temples and mosques were required to agree with every word that came out of a priest’s, preacher’s, rabbi’s, or imam’s mouth, those pews wouldn’t have many people sitting in them in the first place.

And if we hold these attacks to the same standard, you’ll see just how unfair the tactics are. Debbie Schlussel, for instance, once worked for U.S. Rep. Mark Siljander. Siljander was recently indicted for his work for an Islamic charity accused of funneling money to terrorist groups. Does that mean that Debbie Schlussel, therefore, supports Islamic terrorist groups? I think after looking at her webpage, you’d agree that that’s an absurd argument, to say the least.

In an election as important as this one, you can’t afford to let somebody else do your research for you. You need to educate yourself, and you might be surprised at what you learn.

For instance, Levinson doesn’t tell you that Richard Cohen, one of his nine columnists, actually voted for Obama. He doesn’t tell you that AIPAC is satisfied with Obama’s positions on the Middle East. He doesn’t tell you that Shmuel Rosner of Haaretz has written that “Obama supports Israel. Period.” You have to find that out for yourself, and decide whether or not someone’s just trying to use you and your passions as some sort of political pawn in the most important election of our lifetime.

However, if you would have told me a couple months ago that this kind of stuff would be coming from Krugman, I’d never have believed you. I think it demeans him, in a way, though of course it’s probably because I’m an Obama supporter. But he goes off on his rants about “Obama supporters” and never really gives us any meat to back up his claim that “most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama, who want their hero or nobody.”

There are two tidbits that stand out to me as highly ironic. The first is Krugman’s claim that “progressives should realize that Nixonland is not the country we want to be. Racism, misogyny and character assassination are all ways of distracting voters from the issues, and people who care about the issues have a shared interest in making the politics of hatred unacceptable.” If he were following the campaign with any regularity, he’d probably have realized that the Nixonian nature of the Clinton campaign is a major reason behind the Obama supporters’ antagonism. The Clintons work within that framework, Obama is offering a vision that repudiates it. Krugman not-so-deftly glides over the racial aspects of the Clintons’ strategy with a mention of the LBJ/MLK dustup – leaving a slew of other racially-tinged incidents unmentioned. And let’s be honest – if Obama wanted to do the character assassination thing, he could. He could go full bore against all of the controversies, contrived or not, of the Clinton presidency, and he could CERTAINLY go after Hillary on the Hillarycare debacle that set both the cause and the Democratic Party back an entire decade (where were you on that, Paul? That’s the one where all the special interests were left out of the consultations, just like you’re hoping will happen again this time). In my opinion, he should do the latter, but he hasn’t. Obama himself – and let’s remember, that’s who we’re ultimately talking about here – has chosen the high road.

The second and most ironic element to Krugman’s lament over the “Clinton rules” begins with his admission that these rules go beyond the Clintons: “Al Gore was subjected to Clinton rules during the 2000 campaign: anything he said, and some things he didn’t say (no, he never claimed to have invented the Internet), was held up as proof of his alleged character flaws.” Amen, Paulie! Our media is awful – they leech onto narratives and memes that often have no basis in reality!

So how can you POSSIBLY bitch about it in the same column that you actually claim that – as we’re starting to see elsewhere – “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality”? That’s amazing to me, utterly astounding, that you don’t see the hypocrisy in your own column. And it disappoints me quite a bit.

Obama hasn’t created the Clinton rules, and his supporters “taking comfort” in them – again, not much evidence presented – has little if anything to do with what we’re really trying to do here. I expect this kind of crap from Maureen Dowd or David Brooks, not Paul Krugman. But crap is what we’re getting.