Monday, December 10, 2007

HILLARY CLINTON, BARACK OBAMA

Keeping an Eye on Hillary, Obama, and the Muslim Story

Hillary Clinton's campaign is dropping another volunteer who forwarded the "Obama's secretly a Muslim!" e-mail.

Let's not forget that the Insight magazine story that started all of this, back in January, said that they got the information from Hillary's camp. They later doubled down:

Contrary to the article’s headline and frequent statements, there was nothing “false,” “discredited” or “dubious” about our article. Insight never claimed—not once—that Obama had attended an Indonesian Madrassa as a young boy. What we did claim—and stand behind 100 percent—is that the Hillary Clinton camp had conducted an investigation into Obama's Muslim background, and they had concluded he had been raised and educated as a Muslim. In fact, our sources close to the Hillary camp confirmed that the investigators were planning to leak this information to their media allies later this fall—just before the '08 primary campaign. Moreover, our sources also confirmed that the Hillary camp was going to make the issue not so much Obama's Muslim background, but the fact that he had concealed or downplayed it. According to the strategy of the Clinton camp, Obama's alleged concealment and deception was to be the issue—not so much his Muslim heritage. We also reported that the Hillary camp was investigating whether Obama had actually attended a radical Madrassa—and that Clinton's investigators were in the process of trying to find that out.

 

The Times is trying to obscure the real issue: Hillary Clinton's campaign had been conducting extensive opposition research on her main '08 Democratic rival, and they were zeroing in on his Muslim background. 

So when Team Hillary denied it then, and denounced the report, well... it's not like it's unthinkable that someone who supports Clinton would look into this sort of thing — now that we've seen two campaign volunteers spreading it around...

12/10 10:19 AMShare