Right Wing smear.... failed.

Posted by Evan Derkacz at 7:55 AM on January 29, 2007.

Fox, MSNBC, Rush Limbaugh and others picked up a false story claiming that the Barack Obama had briefly attended a radical Islamic school when he was 6 which, the story claimed, he subsequently attempted to cover up.

The piece, anonymously sourced and anonymously written, further charged that it had come from the camp of Obama's opponent for the '08 candidacy, Hillary Clinton.

Where did this story really come from?

A man named Jeffrey T. Kuhner, a far right ideologue who runs a nearly defunct and thoroughly discredited rag called Insight, funded by the Rev. Moon's Unification Church.

The irony of course, with the marriage of the Moonie enterprises -- Insight, Wash Times -- with the rest of the right wing, is that Moon considers himself the Messiah, a blasphemous proposition to much of the rest of the right wing constituency.

Kuhner, the Times notes, still stands by his discredited story claiming that it's as "solid as solid can be."

But here's the punch line. Kuhner is unsatisfied by all them fancy news organizations and their ability to go to Jakarta to talk to the people firsthand but he was, apparently, satisfied enough by his own anonymous source with all its undocumented hearsay to post the story:

Mr. Kuhner said, "Our report on this opposition research activity is completely accurate," and he argued that all major news organizations relied on anonymous sources. Mr. Kuhner, in an editor’s note on Insight, said the Web site could not afford to "send correspondents to places like Jakarta to check out every fact in a story." The Web site pays up to $800 for an article.

Mr. Kuhner said he was not yet convinced by reports from officials of the elementary school that Mr. Obama attended in Indonesia about its secular history. "To simply take the word of a deputy headmaster about what was the religious curriculum of a school 35 years ago does not satisfy our standards for aggressive investigative reporting," he wrote.

Wow, what integrity.

We can only guess whether the Fox, MSNBC and others will think twice before ever touching crap from this joker again. As for Human Events and The National Review, two other right wing organs he's written for...

Note to Right Wing candidates: This is a bad sign. If swiftboating doesn't work it's going to be exceedingly difficult to win elections.

Tagged as: moonies, fox, hillary clinton, '08, obama, right wing, media

Evan Derkacz is an AlterNet editor. He writes and edits PEEK, the blog of blogs.