Your Handy Guide to the Right’s 11th-Hour Attacks on Obama

Thus far this election season, we’ve witnessed a number of scare tactics cooked up by conservatives hoping to scare the bejeezus out of voters who might even consider choosing Barack Obama over John McCain, and the fun isn’t over yet.

What will they think of next? Mother Jones’ David Corn has a few ideas.

David Corn in Mother Jones’ “MoJo Blog”:

Obama Is Fronting for Islamic Jihadists. Writing in The Washington Times this week, former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, charges that Obama’s campaign has received “between $30 million and $100 million” from the Mideast, Africa and other places [where] Islamists are active.” He asserts it “seems likely” that “these funds come not only from Wahhabis, Muslim Brotherhood types and jihadists of other stripes but from non-U.S. citizens.” (His evidence? Don’t be so picky.) Gaffney adds that “Obama hopes to win the White House by relying, in part, on the Jihadist vote.” He writes: “The next three weeks afford the American people — and the media, the courts and the [Federal Elections Commission] — an opportunity to get to the bottom of Barack Obama’s ties to and affinity for jihadists who have their own reasons for relishing his promise of ‘change’ for this country. Unfortunately, the change his Islamists supporters have in mind is for global theocratic rule under Shariah, and the end of our constitutional, democratic government.” Message: Obama will destroy Christianity in the United States and enslave you within an Islamic dictatorship.

This is heady stuff. And there are, no doubt, more 11th hour assaults in the works. Right-wing bloggers have promoted a British news story reporting that an African-American poet and friend of Obama’s grandfather in Hawaii — when Obama was being raised by his grandparents — wrote pornography and engaged in sex with a 13-year-old girl. (Stop everything: Obama, when he was a teenager, received advice on how to be a black man from a pervert!) And one right-wing blogger has been pushing the conspiracy theory that it was Bill Ayers who actually wrote Obama’s book Dreams From My Father.

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