This should ease you all alittle bit about how Obama will respond to swiftboating

[angie_love]

From Politco:

Speaking to a Jewish group this morning in Cleveland, Obama offered an extended response to a question about the Muslim smear that is worth posting in full.

Note, in particular, his shrewd comments (bolded) about how the new media rules demand an aggressive response:

“Well, let’s just be very specific about what these emails have been. And they have just been virulent and started very early. And I have to say are not. I mean they are clearly political in the sense that they go in waves. And seem to track the next…the next primary or caucus. Suddenly they magically appear in great volume in whatever state it is we are campaigning. And the emails suggest that A. that I am Muslim, B. that I went to a madrassa C. that I used a Koran to swear myself into the Senate D. That I don’t pledge allegiance to the flag. There are all sorts of variations, but you get the general gist. And our general view has been, that the internet is very difficult, because it is very low cost, it can just be churned out and you can’t trace it back to where it’s coming from. What we have tried to do is just make sure that we are flooding the internet with the accurate information and pushing back as much as possible. I don’t think that we are in an era anymore where you can just ignore these things and not dignify them. There was a time when they would be amplified as consequence of you calling attention to it.

I don’t think that’s the case any more because of our media age. You know we saw what happened with the swiftboat situation back in 2004. All you have to do is run the ad once and then it gets repeated. And so what we’ve done is try to lift it up and actively debunk it and encourage stories about it. If anyone is still puzzled about the facts, in fact I have never been a Muslim. We had to send CNN to look at the school that I attended in Indonesia where kids were wearing short pants and listening to ipods to indicate that this was not a madrassa but was a secular school in Indonesia. Where I attended for two year prior to coming back to Hawaii. If you look at Nicholas Kristof’s article today it gives you an indication of where I got my name. My grandfather who was Kenyan converted to Christianity then converted to Islam, my father never practiced he was basically agnostic and so other than my name and the fact that I lived in a populous Muslim country for 4 years when I was a child I have very little connection to the Islamic religion. But these are the kind of things that you deal with in politics.”

http://www.politico.com/blogs/jonathanmartin/
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Obviously the rethug machine will hit him hard, but it gives me abit of ease knowing that hes aware of the need to respond to attacks quickly and avoid being swiftboated like Kerry was in 2004.