Patronage employees spread Obama smear

Your tax dollars at work, America.

Almost every smear in recent years against a political figure who dissents from the rightist order originates near the top of the Republican party apparatus. Often the RNC sends out bogus information about a Democratic politician to right-wing talk-shit hosts and bloggers, who then run with the story. The mainstream media obediently complies by picking up the story as if it's legit.

Now a probe of 3 federal patronage employees proves again that these smears originate near the top. The Republican machine doles out patronage jobs like a school does psychotropic drugs. The United States today is almost a one-party system. More so than at any other time in the country's history, a party apparatus is merged at the trough with the government.

The U.S. Office of Special Counsel is an independent federal agency entrusted with the task of making sure civil service workers don't illegally engage in political activism on the job. Now the OSC is investigating 3 employees of 2 different federal agencies for reportedly sending out e-mail spams falsely claiming Barack Obama is a "radical Muslim." This is where this smear is believed to have originated.

Obama never was a Muslim. (I wouldn't oppose a candidate just because the candidate is Muslim, but that's a whole other matter.) He never was a radical Muslim either. He never was a radical anything. But the claim that he's a "radical Muslim" is still circulated by the wingnutosphere as if it's true. (Most major conservative blogs and many right-wing newsgroup posts are themselves funded by the RNC.) At least one website for a local Republican Party republishes the e-mail, even though the contents of it are a lie.

That the 3 patronage employees used job time and work equipment to send out the e-mails means your tax dollars were misspent to pay for partisan smears. The taxpayers were supposed to be paying them to perform valuable government services, but instead they goofed off at work by sending out spam and engaging in partisan politics.

Recently an employee of the U.S. Army Medical Command was caught spreading the same propaganda about Barack Obama. And during the 2004 campaign, smears against John Kerry from government computers were pandemic.

The big question is, will the OSC be able to keep this investigation going without Bush cutting off all its funding?

(Source: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/26/3_us_workers_face_investigation_over_obama_e_mail)