Democratic Senator Barack Obama is fighting cyber attacks and innuendo with a Web site that seeks to debunk Internet rumors, most notably a claim his wife used a racial epithet during a church talk.
The Internet move is an unusual one in US politics, where candidates routinely ignore fabricated negative stories about them — unless they reach a boil — rather than risk giving them more publicity with explanations or denials.
The Obama campaign appeared to be trying to get out front of a flurry of expected attacks from Republican-allied nonprofit groups, knowns as 527s after the section of the US tax code that governs them, that can raise unlimited funds for TV ads not controlled by campaigns.
PHOTO: AP
Both Obama and Republican Senator John McCain are running on pledges of changing the highly partisan atmosphere in Washington that has frequently slipped into gutter politics.
The top item on the Obama site, www.fightthesmears.com, inaugurated on Thursday, denies a persistent claim that Obama’s wife, Michelle, used the word “whitey” in a talk she once gave at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
The Obamas recently resigned from the congregation after it became a source of embarrassment for the campaign, beginning with revelations of inflammatory remarks by Reverend Jeremiah Wright during his years as pastor.
Here’s the lead item on the new Web site: “Lie: On May 30th, [right wing talk radio host] Rush Limbaugh said he had heard a rumor that a tape exists of Michelle Obama using the word ‘whitey’ while speaking from the pulpit of Trinity United Church of Christ. “Truth: No such tape exists. Michelle Obama has not spoken from the pulpit at Trinity and has not used that word.”
The site also rebutted claims that Obama is a Muslim, that he attended a radical Islamic primary school when living in Indonesia and that he took the Senate oath on a Koran, the Muslim holy book.
The Web posting says the truth is “Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim and is a committed Christian.”
Michelle Obama has often been the target of conservative attacks, prompting Obama to demand his rivals “lay off my wife.” Much of the criticism came from her comment that her husband’s campaign had made her proud of her country “for the first time,” a remark that inspired a Tennessee Republican Party Web video questioning her patriotism.
There also have been more insulting attacks, and not just limited to the Internet.
The Fox News Channel labeled her as “Obama’s baby mama,” a term that originated as urban black slang for a woman who has a baby with a man who is not her husband or her boyfriend. It also raised the suggestion that she gave her husband a “terrorist fist jab” when they bumped knuckles in congratulation the night he clinched the nomination.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
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