Opinion: Advice to Obama Bashers: Aim Lower

(July 27) -- The right wing, starting with blogger Andrew Breitbart, thought it had a find when it discovered video of a black woman, little-known USDA employee Shirley Sherrod, talking about race to the NAACP. But the attack backfired when it emerged that Breitbart had taken Sherrod's comments out of a context in which she was laying out her own progress toward racial tolerance -- progress that Breitbart and his ilk actively resist.

This is the same right wing that attacked ACORN, using a goofball who claimed he went into their offices dressed as a pimp and won a game of "gotcha." Except, as it turned out, he didn't wear the pimp outfit into ACORN offices, and the right lost the game of "gotcha" when both the Brooklyn district attorney and the nonpartisan Congressional Research Office found ACORN was not guilty of anything.

The right wing homed in on a small group of crazies called the New Black Panther Party, which represents almost no one, and tried to make the case that because the Justice Department didn't prosecute them for voter intimidation, the Obama administration doesn't want to prosecute black people. Forget that Bush didn't prosecute the same case, either, and not one voter said he or she was intimidated. The goal was to get Attorney General Eric Holder -- but they failed at that one, too.

Did Breitbart, who promoted the ACORN story and the Sherrod story, ever step up to the plate and say he was wrong? No, he blamed Sherrod, the farmers she helped, and the media, claiming that Sherrod still had race problems, the farmers might not have been the farmers, and the media exhibits the sin of being liberal.

Of course admitting a mistake requires humility. And a conscience.

OK, so they failed to successfully smear Shirley Sherrod, ACORN was exonerated, and the New Black Panther Party was let off the hook by, it turned out, the Bush administration.

Maybe it's time those on the right learned a lesson: If they want to succeed, they'll have to aim lower. See if the cleaning lady who polishes the brass outside the Oval Office ever attended a meeting of 9/11 Truthers. Explore whether the driver in Obama's presidential limo ever read a book by Noam Chomsky. Find out if the valet who uses the whisk broom on the first lady to ensure that she is lint-free has a relative who is now or has ever been an advocate of wealth redistribution.

Do that, and pretty soon you have a narrative. And then you can tie it all to President Obama. After all, look who he surrounds himself with!

Of course, it won't do any good, because your side will have to do the one thing that will keep those opposing the president unable to harm him: Your side will, eventually, have to face the voters.