The boys on the bus

Monkey-typing
Originally uploaded by vegacura.

He's damned lucky the keyboard was invented, because I'm not sure Mike Allen has the mental faculty holding a pencil requires.

Looks like the blogs are going to be busy this cycle rebutting smears against our candidates. This latest is penned by Mike Allen.

Now, Obama's about to endure a going-over that would make a proctologist blush. Why has he sometimes said his first name is Arabic, and other times Swahili?

How suspicious! The answer, as both Brad Delong and The Poorman note, is that Swahili and Arabic are extremely similar languages because of millenia of trade between East Africa and the Middle East. Delong writes, ""Barack" is both a Swahili word meaning "blessed by God" and an Arabic word meaning "blessed.""

Whoever gave Allen the smear sought him out because they are building a political narrative around Obama divorced from important political issues. And Allen repeated the smear without checking because it seemed to fit into the story he wanted to tell. In this same article, Allen said that party strategists argued that Obama is vulnerable because of "his frank liberalism in a time when the party needs centrist voters." Where does this come from? According to recent polling data I dug up in one minute, Obama is stronger among independents relative to Clinton than he is among any other block of voters. Yet there Allen is, writing a conventional wisdom that 'party strategists' are telling him, even though it's patently false.

It's going to be a greasy road on the way to November 2008.

And it looks like Obama's not going to play nice with assholes like Mike Allen.