How to Erase That Smea...

[groovedaddy]

When Thomas Jefferson found himself accused of planning to burn all Bibles and legalize prostitution if elected president in 1800, he was ready with a counterpunch that might make today’s most vitriolic campaign operatives stop short, if only to gape upon the greatness that once was presidential campaign slander.

Jefferson’s rival, President John Adams, was endowed with a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman”; and if re-elected he would crown himself king; and, by the way, he was “mentally deranged.”

The author of the attacks was not Jefferson himself, of course, but a master poison-pen pamphleteer named James Callender, who, historians have since determined, was bankrolled completely by Jefferson. (For his efforts, Callender spent nine months in prison under the Sedition Act for saying those things about a sitting president; Jefferson pardoned him immediately after defeating Adams and taking office.)

So, if this year’s entries in the annals of presidential campaign smears seem likely to reach depths never before plumbed — the latest example, some would say, being the book “Obama Nation,” which suggests that Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, may be a drug-addicted, Muslim, radical leftist — they probably won’t.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/weekinreview/17vitello.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[1monster]

1. Wasn't the Alien and Sedition Act deemed unconstitutional?

[endthewar]

2. I've heard Obama denounce it during his July 4th speech

[1monster]

3. All of the Alien and Seditions Acts except the Alien Enemies Act either

expired in 1802 or were repealed...

The Alien Enemies Act is still viable in 2008. So perhaps that is law that Obama was talking about.