Susan Smith's kids weren't kidnapped by a black man either.

Remember Susan Smith? She's the South Carolina woman who in 1994 rolled her car into a lake with her two young children inside because the man with whom she was having an affair didn't want a "ready-made" family. Then she claimed that her children had been kidnapped by a black man. Wingnut icon Newt Gingrich blamed liberals:

In Gingrich's view the real cause of Susan Smith's act was not Susan Smith; she was just the "efficient cause" in the Aristotelian sense. The formal cause was the 60's -- liberalism, the Great Society, the counterculture -- and the amoral social ethic they supposedly produced. It wasn't Susan Smith who pushed the Mazda into the lake; it was George McGovern.

Later on, it turned out that Smith had been sexually abused by her stepfather from the time she was fifteen. Beverly Russell was a Christian Coalition county chairman.

Charles Stuart and his wife weren't carjacked by a black man either. On October 23, 1989, Stuart and his pregnant wife Carol went to childbirth class and on the way home. Stuart claimed that a raspy-voiced black man had robbed them, shooting Carol in the head and Stuart himself in the stomach. Stuart later identified a black man, Willie Bennett, as the attacker, and Bennett might have gone to jail for life for a crime he didn't commit, given the media frenzy about the case, had not Stuart's own brother Matthew not had a conscience and confessed to helping Charles Stuart commit insurance fraud by killing Carol. Charles Stuart committed suicide before he could be arrested and tried.

And Ashley Todd was not attacked a black male Barack Obama supporter at an ATM who then carved a "B" into her face because he was enraged at her McCain bumper sticker.

How sick and demented a wingnut do you have to be in order to this to yourself as a political stunt?



You would think that after all these years, and all the cases like that of Susan Smith and Charles Stuart, we wouldn't see the rush to judgment every time someone white claims to have been attacked by a black man. But of course the usual suspects (with the surprising and notable of Michelle Malkin, to whom I will give props for once for smelling a rat when only an idiot wouldn't smell one) were of course frothing at the mouth about the hatemongers in the Democratic Party, especially those Scary Negroes™ who would assault (including sexually, of course -- Mayella Ewell lives!) a poor defenseless flower of white womanhood.

I would be willing to feel that this woman is more to be pitied than censured, because after all, as I said, how sick do you have to be to cut your own face to try to influence people to not vote for a black man? Except that the McCain campaign jumped on this and tried to make hay out of it, as Greg Sargent noted:

John McCain's Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established -- and even told reporters outright that the "B" carved into the victim's cheek stood for "Barack," according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson."

Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax.

The KDKA reporter had called McCain's campaign office for details after seeing the story -- sans details -- teased on Drudge.

The McCain spokesperson's claims -- which came in the midst of extraordinary and heated conversations late yesterday between the McCain campaign, local TV stations, and the Obama camp, as the early version of the story rocketed around the political world -- is significant because it reveals a McCain official pushing a version of the story that was far more explosive than the available or confirmed facts permitted at the time.

The claims to KDKA from the McCain campaign were included in an early story that ran late yesterday on KDKA's Web site. The paragraphs containing these assertions were quickly removed from the story after the Obama campaign privately complained that KDKA was letting the McCain campaign spin a racially-charged version of the story before the facts had been established, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

The sickness that infects the Republican Party, and the McCain/Palin supporters who believed this crap, is so deep that I don't think the patient can be saved. It is the kind of sickness that we've already seen from the devolution of John McCain into a raging, angry, vindictive, hateful gargoyle and the lunatic, delusional idiocy of Sarah Palin, and that we now see in their supporters: