Public figures' records are fair game in political campaigns. It's not "mudslinging" unless it's untrue or employs "derogatory personal slurs," according to the Living Webster Dictionary.
You have to know that times are desperate in the Obama campaign when Sen. Harry Reid is trotted out to contend that Mitt Romney didn't pay taxes for a decade.
Barack Obama's 2006 best-seller, "The Audacity of Hope," gave us a number of clues as to how he would govern based on his worldview. We can't say we weren't warned. Amid the graceful prose, we see underlying hostility toward the idea of revealed truth (apart from his own).
Turns out he's not Kenyan after all. He's KGB. All this time, people were worried that President Obama was born in Africa and that his radical agenda had been crafted by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Saul Alinsky on the streets of Chicago's South Side.
This year's presidential election will be a contest between truth and lies. Don't think it's that stark? Let's compare how the media handled two incidents. On Feb. 16, philanthropist Foster Friess, a major backer and adviser to Rick Santorum, cracked a joke that became a media sensation.
Wal-Mart and top D.C. officials shared the mayor's podium Wednesday to announce that instead of building four stores in the city, the retail giant now is hoping to plant a sustainable economic development footprint with six stores.
Until recently, most politicians, pundits and others among the "smart people" insisted that Election 2012 was all about jobs, jobs, jobs. The more broad-minded contended that the related issues of the lousy economy and the imperatives of deficit reduction also might feature. But that was all that mattered, especially in the presidential contest.
Abraham Lincoln rightly denounced the "mobocratic spirit." James Madison considered it the sa- cred duty of government to protect property rights from the violent whims of the mob: "That is not a just government, nor is property secure under it, where the property which a man has in his personal safety and personal liberty, is violated by arbitrary seizures of one class of citizens for the service of the rest."
"We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again," President Obama fantasized on the campaign stump in Iowa. "But over the last six months, we've had a run of bad luck."
