The gangster approach to American politics, conspicuously at work in the McCain-Palin-Hannity-Limbaugh-&-Co. air war of innuendos, insinuations, smears, slanders, lies, three-quarter lies, distortions and evasions, is also well along in the ground war.

Here's a copy of a flyer circulating in Philadelphia last weekend. A person or persons helpfully signing himself or herself as "Anonymous" claims that "an Obama supporter approached me during a rock the vote assembly" and said that on Election Day "there will be undercover officers to execute warrants on those who come to vote....He advised me if I had any outstanding warrants or traffic offenses I should clear them up prior to voting." And so on.

I wonder how much of this sort of thing is going on elsewhere in PA and other swing states.

Jim Rutenberg has a piece in the morning NYT on the Hannity loonfest that graced Fox News Sunday night.

It's good that the Times found Hannity's garbage pail newsworthy. But the piece bends over backwards to give Andy Martin, of whom I wrote Sunday night, the benefit of the doubt. He tells Rutenberg that the anti-Semitic sentiments were forged. By whom? With what motive? Why were these remarks reported in the Washington Times, and never retracted?

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Calling the Anti-Defamation League, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, and other defenders of Jewish people against slime artists of all political persuasions:

Sean Hannity's Fox News Sunday night kitchen-sink sewer job on Barack Obama, complete with a sound-track cribbed from C- porn flicks, features prominently, as witness of Obama's iniquity, one Andy Martin, "author and journalist," and, though not identified as such on Fox News, perennial political candidate in four states.

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Sarah Palin in Colorado yesterday:

I was reading my copy of today's New York Times and I was interested to read about Barack's friends from Chicago....Turns out one of Barack's earliest supporters is a man who, according to the New York Times, and they are hardly ever wrong, was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that quote launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and US Capitol. Wow.

As Gov. Palin would say, Wow. You betcha she's off message. The paper that's hardly ever wrong was accused two weeks ago of being "an Obama advocacy organization" that perpetrated "a partisan attack falsely labeled as objective news." Oh, but that reckless accuser was, let's see, was it, yes, the McCain campaign.

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