Gitcher lurid rightwing character smears right here
by digby
During the 90s there were endless lurid Clinton pseudo-scandals created by the nutballs and scam artists that dwell in the most fetid regions of the right wing fever swamps. One of the more famous was a video called The Clinton Chronicles which was flogged heavily by Christian Right icon Jerry Falwell in his church and on TV. It purported to proved that Clinton was a murderer and a drug runner among other things. Who knows how many people saw it?
Lest anyone think this con game has gone away, think again:
An anti-Obama movie claiming — without evidence — that President Barack Obama's real father is an obscure African-American communist has been mailed to 1.5 million voters across the country, its creator told BuzzFeed Friday.
A reader in Ohio emailed this photo of his free copy of the film Dreams From My Real Father, which claims that the Chicago activist Frank Marshall Davis is actually President Obama's father. He received it in the mail this week.
The film's director and producer, Joel Gilbert, said that the film was sent out to more one million voters in Ohio; 200,000 after a mid-summer conference, and a million after that. He said that 50,000 copies had been sent to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire.
And then there's this monstrous, obviously photo-shopped smear of Obama's mother:
And, of course, there's the phony "expose" of Hillary Clinton by long time huckster David Bossie of Citizens United, which was the subject of the Supreme Court case that bears its name.
I guess the right sees Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 411 in the same light, which it isn't, of course, since it's not a character smear or filled with lies. But even if it were, I can't think of leftwing equivalents to this sort of thing. I suppose there could be some, but I'm unaware of anyone sending out DVDs "exposing" some nefarious deeds by Mitt Romney or John McCain or George W. Bush or flogging them at union meetings (or whatever.) Yet this has been a factor in American far right conservatism forever. The John Birch society published books and pamphlets back in the day and there's always been this underground network of character assassination, usually featuring some lurid sexual/racial angle that appeals to certain lizard brains.
I don't know if this still exists in other cultures (it certainly did in Europe in the 20s) but it's still a prominent feature of the dark underbelly of American conservatism.
Update: Also too, this.
Update II: And this from Susie.
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