They're learning

Yesterday the right-wing blogosphere tried to launch a kerfuffle about supposed anti-Semitic comments posted on the comment boards of the Obama web site. This is known as nut-picking and John Aravosis (here) and Jed (here and here) both do a great job of destroying the argument.

What prompts this post is this comment by Ben Smith at the Politico:

The raised level of press and public sophistication on this is
striking: I think at this point, most people are willing to accept that
both candidates can't control everything that happens on their sites, a
source of major confusion in 2004, when MoveOn was accused of using
Nazi comparisons because a user of the site did.

I noticed that this smear attempt was getting a lot of play in the right wing-o-sphere. It was filling nearly half a page on Memeorandum. But today it has disappeared. In other words, they threw out the bait but no one bit. Not even FOX news (yet).

It may take a while to educate media folks about how the web works, but many of them can learn.

Update: It looks the counter-meme launched by John and Jed is starting to take off on memeorandum. It will be interesting to see if this gets more bites than the original meme.

Update x2: Maybe I was a bit premature on this. From Phoenix Woman of Firedoglake I learn that Ben Smith actually did take the bait, at least initially, before fully acknowledging it was questionable and making his above comment. PW also suggests that the original posting that launched this story may have been a rat-fuck plant. I can believe that. But I can also believe that there are nuts out there that shouldn't be used as exemplars of Obama supporters.