McCain confronts the Obama attack machine

Here is the full text of a statement made by the McCain campaign on September 3, 2008.

Stop the Smears

Of the many smears against Governor Palin now being circulated by left-wing bloggers and amplified by the national media, only one seems to have been directly picked up by the Obama campaign and its surrogates--that Governor Palin was once a supporter of Pat Buchanan, and that she is therefore a Nazi sympathizer.

The first attack came from Obama surrogate Rep. Robert Wexler, the co-chair of Obama's campaign in Florida. Wexler, badly mangling his facts, accused Governor Palin of supporting Pat Buchanan in the 2000 Alaska primary. Based on this he asserted that Governor Palin had "aligned herself with a leading anti-Israel voice in American politics," while finding space to invoke the name of Adolph Hitler and the phrase "Nazi sympathizer." Only it wasn't true--Palin was an official on the Forbes campaign in 2000. Wexler never apologized or retracted his statement.

Then an official Obama spokesman picked up the charge in a statement to the Miami Herald:

"Palin was a supporter of [MSNBC analyst] Pat Buchanan, a right-winger or as many Jews call him: a Nazi sympathizer,'' Obama spokesman Mark Bubriski wrote in an email.

Governor Palin has never supported Pat Buchanan and every responsible magazine or blog that made the charge has since corrected the record, leaving only the Obama campaign peddling this smear. How is it that the media, so committed to fighting the smears against the Obama campaign, is more than happy to allow this one to fester?