Astroturfing Palin & Race-baiting, etc UPDATED

:::UPDATE:::SCROLL DOWN FOR ORIGINAL POST::: Looks like the press is mildly interested Amazing! :::END UPDATE:::

As Tom Hanks said in A League of Their Own, “it’s gettin’ interestin’ out there…”

Rusty Shackleford at The Jawa Report has traced a lying smear campaign, using a supposedly “grassroots video gone viral – and meant to destroy Gov. Sarah Palin – and he’s found that all roads lead appear to lead – note, they appear to lead – to the Axelrod side of the Obama campaign. It’s an amazing piece of work done by Jawa, and within an hour of the piece posting, various and sundry entities named began (in the middle of the night, by jove) feverishly trying to delete and dismantle. Now, now…we all know that a coverup is always worse that the actual scandal. If these folks have something to say, they should come on out and say it, don’t you think…I mean, if what they have to say is true?

This is part of Axelrod’s “astroturfing strategy” – put out something fake that “looks” real – and do it through alternative media; let the DU people and so forth throw it around so it looks like it arrived “organically.”

Sarah Palin is still in their heads – big time. As I wrote the other day, she seriously rocked the Obama campaign and the press. The proof of it is that the press is trying desperately not to cover her if they can help it. Perfunctory coverage of her email being hacked, a distortion of her dis-invitation to today’s UN protest with no media coverage of the Obama campaign’s thug-like threats to the Jewish group who invited her (“Nice little tax-exempt organization you have there…shame if something happened to it”). (By the way, here is the speech Palin would have given, and Hewitt culls the cream from it.

It is a shame that today – thanks to the apparent strong-arming of Jews by the Obama camp (and it chills me to even write that phrase) – no prominent American was at that rally, saying these strong words, voicing unequivocal support for Israel, or reassuring Jews here and abroad that someone cares about whether they’re wiped off the map.

I didn’t see ANY major coverage of Palin speaking to 60,000 people yesterday, did you? Nope. She draws a crowd like that – without a band to bring people out for the free concert, and it goes mostly unnoted. The power of the press – since their credibility is destroyed – now rests in their ability to NOT cover something, and therefore effectively omit it from the national dialogue, which it still cues.

Which means – you know it – the chances of the Obama-loving media actually reporting the story of an underhanded smear campaign, or this related story about slime-emails…well, those chances are very, very slim. So, if you care about fairness in this election, maybe make some noise? Why not? Call a local tv station and ask them to cover this. Write to the press. Be polite, be sane, but ask them why this is not news? Ask them why it is not news that the “in your face” Obama campaign ties up radio lines to thwart free speech and the open-exchange of ideas?, and how offensive they’d find that, if a Republican campaign was encouraging it! And check out the deafening silence.

Also, has the press been caught manufacturing “white racist” quotes? Nothing would surprise me anymore, and as you know, the Obama camp began playing the “unending racism card” last week, as well. Suddenly the man who could win Iowa so substantially is finding racism everywhere and that is what will cause his eventual defeat. Not his inexperience, not his gaffes. Just his race. Or that is the groundwork being laid, anyway. Check this out:

The Associated Press reported this evening and an Obama spokeswoman confirmed that the Chicago-based campaign is pulling its 50-some staffers out of the heavily Republican state full of embittered small towns and shipping the workers east to Minnesota and Wisconsin, where the Democrat’s prospects seem brighter and closer.
[…]
The abandonment of at least one Midwestern state by Obama comes as a new AP poll indicates that race could play a significant role in deciding a close national election. Some experts estimate the first African American candidate of a major party might be as much as 6 percentage points more ahead if he wasn’t black.

That AP poll was convenient, wasn’t it? I think Ed Morrissey has the sanest analysis I’ve seen on it:

I’m not going to discount this out of hand. Most conventional wisdom would have it as a wash — that the number of people not voting for Obama because of his race would be roughly offset by those voting for him expressly or primarily for that reason. Both voters exist, and examples of the latter can be found in the media.
[…]
…First, the methodology seems rather suspect. They ask several questions about attitudes that hardly seems predictive of voting patterns, and their own numbers show why. The attitudes don’t change on an age-demographic basis, while Obama’s support clearly is strongest among younger voters. If that depended on less racism, then his support demographics would make no sense (or this poll does a bad job in identifying racism). Two-thirds of Democrats who note two or more negative attitudes towards blacks plan to vote for Obama, making supposed racism a non-factor.

Fortunately, we have more solid evidence at hand. First, Obama beat Hillary Clinton, especially in caucuses, where enthusiasm counts much more than in normal primaries. Given the AP/Yahoo findings in their polling, Obama never should have beaten the better-organized and more well-known Hillary. Second, Obama has almost no resumé for this job. When was the last time a major party nominated a first-term Senator with no executive or military experience as its presidential nominee? Obama’s ethnicity may not have been the reason why Democrats nominated him with these real questions about experience, but it certainly didn’t appear to handicap him, either.

They still could be correct about their conclusions, but they need much better evidence than what they show here.

The press never stops to think that for a candidate who is the most liberal Dem since the 1960’s, to be running the same numbers as Kerry and Gore is pretty damned remarkable and evidence against the “racist” charge. But that won’t do. The narrative currently being constructed is this: It is not possible that anyone would consider Obama lacking experience in economics, finance, security issues, executive leadership, bi-partisan coalition-building or foreign affairs. Nah. As Bill Maher said, anyone who doesn’t vote for Obama can only be a moron or a racist. So, just put your brains back into your pockets and pull the damn lever for Obama, to prove you’re not either!

This goes along with my previous point. What the press does not want you to see, you will not see. What it does want you to see, you’ll see everywhere. The press wants you to see Sarah Palin and John McCain in the worst possible way, and Obama in the best. Which would be fine, if they’d just admit it and stop pretending they’re the gatekeepers and mediating intelligences who are somehow “keeping things balanced.”

In any case, here are the updates to the Shackleford expose. As I said, there has been immediate reaction, and lots of dismantling.

Instapundit links to a 2004 warning about “Blog Black-Ops”. And if you think it’s about racism, you might be a racist! :-)