Sarah Palin is fearmongering again. This time she says Barack Obama has been palling around with a guy named Rashid Khalidi, whom she says “in addition to being a political ally of Barack Obama he's former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization.” She says it's “interesting what we are finding out in the last couple days” and “this is important.” There are just three problems with her claim:

1. This association isn't something new we're learning about in the last couple of days before the election. This article, dated March 14^th, fully describes Khalidi's relationship with Obama, in the context of lies and smears that Republicans were spewing at that time.
2. According to that article, “Khalidi says he was never employed by the PLO; he has been a harsh critic of Palestinian suicide bombings and a longtime supporter of a two-state solution, and he has never been an adviser to Obama.” Obama agreed, saying “He is not one of my advisors; he's not one of my foreign policy people.”
3. John McCain gave Rashid Khalidi half a million dollars in 1998. Well, not really, but that's closer to the truth than anything the McCain campaign is trying to suggest about Obama. Actually, the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, which Khalid co-founded, received a grant for $448,873 from the International Republican Institute, which McCain was chairman of.

My first reaction to this is, what is the McCain campaign doing? Have they completely lost their minds? But then I remember, in a divisive political campaign, nobody cares about reality. Hell, if you find someone who actually believes this nonsense and you confront them with the facts, it will only make them believe the lies more.