The American Spectator

With few exceptions, the mainstream media has fallen down on the job covering the meteoric rise of Senator Barack Obama, so when every once in a while a journalist takes an honest, critical look at Obama, people who believe in the democratic process should welcome the discussion. But instead of welcoming the opportunity, the Obama campaign tries to suppress legitimate debate by engaging in Leninist political theater.

If Obama has nothing to hide, what’s he so afraid of?

The campaign’s Obama Action Wire tried to drown out investigative journalist David Freddoso who wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Case Against Barack Obama, when he appeared September 15 on “Extension 720,” a Chicago radio show.

The Obama campaign sent out an emergency “Obama Wire Alert” to supporters, urging them to stir up trouble for Freddoso, whose book is now number 5 on the Times’ bestseller list (hardcover nonfiction), the Chicago Tribune’s blog, The Swamp, reports. “The author of the latest anti-Barack hit book is appearing on WGN Radio in the Chicagoland market tonight, and your help is urgently needed to make sure his baseless lies don’t gain credibility,” the political all-points bulletin read.

“David Freddoso has made a career off dishonest, extreme hate mongering,” the email claimed. “And WGN apparently thinks this card-carrying member of the right-wing smear machine needs a bigger platform for his lies and smears about Barack Obama — on the public airwaves.”

ANYONE WHO KNOWS David Freddoso knows this is a vicious libel. The hard-driving Freddoso, a veteran of the Evans-Novak Political Report, has great integrity. Instead of giving credibility to wild conspiracy theories about Obama (as some in-the-know conservatives say Jerome Corsi did in The Obama Nation), he has steadfastly refused to adopt the template that other critics of Obama have relied on. Specifically, he rejects the Corsi approach and has earned high praise from commentators such as the Heritage Foundation’s Conn Carroll for taking the high road.

In his book, Freddoso writes that Obama is “the least experienced politician in at least one hundred years to obtain a major party nomination for President of the United States,” and that throughout his accomplishment-free political career Obama has consistently backed the Chicago political machine over genuine reformers. “He is simply another liberal Democratic politician who will divide America along the same lines as it has been divided for decades,” Freddoso writes.

Obama is on record supporting the gruesome medical procedure known as “partial-birth abortion,” or as normal people call it, infanticide. As an Illinois state senator, he insisted that aborting babies alive and leaving them to die in a cold, dark closet was a physician’s prerogative.

These are all easily verifiable facts, yet the Obama campaign accuses Freddoso of hate mongering.

Freddoso asks Barack, “How many unrepentant Communist terrorists do you have as friends?” [p. 126] This question is so ridiculous it refutes itself. Barack might as well ask Freddoso how many leprechauns he’s friends with.