If we're dragging politicians' families through the mud it seems only fair to do some digging into the distant past of the mysterious Barack Obama. His ancestors came, of course, from an exotic foreign land: a mysterious, magical island called "Ireland." According to an Irish genealogy site: "Obama's earliest known relative, his 6th great grandfather, was a member of a family of wealthy wig makers who included an Irish politician, Michael Kearney." This Michael "Hussein" Kearney was apparently exactly like his distant descendant Barack Obama. A contemporary scurrilous pamphlet said of him: "No man alive was equally fired with ambition." Zing...?

John McCain is playing dirty! Tonight, after Barack Obama's speech, McCain bought airtime for a rebuttal ad. There are no details on which markets and channels the ad will air on ("battleground states" does not mean much!) but it will surely end up repeated on every channel in the name of "news" a couple million times. What will McCain do in this mysterious and unprecedented ad? We're not sure, but this is a terrible sign:

Bill Ayers was a founding member of the Weather Underground, a patently ridiculous white radical organization that specialized in being dumb hippies. They liked to blow up symbolic things like statues. Once they put a bomb in the Pentagon! No one was hurt except for some files. Anyway. This was years ago and since then, Bill has become so goddamn respectable that Mayor Richard Daley tapped him to head a "public-private partnership" dedicated to improving Chicago public schools. Barack Obama was on the board of a philanthropic foundation with Bill in 1999 which means, according to this fantastic attack ad, that Barack Obama wanted to blow up the Pentagon just like the terrorists of 9/11. Except worse! Ha ha this ad is ridiculous and you won't see it on TV because no one will air it, except for an obscure little company that owns local stations covering a quarter of the country. (And us. And we cover the world! Except for China probably.) A McCain fundraiser named Harold Simmons funded the ad through one of those shadowy nonprofits the kids are so into these days called the "American Issues Project." Simmons was, you may be shocked to learn, also a Swift Boat Veterans for Truth funder. This particular ad is so distorted that CNN and even Fox News have refused to run it! Which leaves, of course, the local channels owned by Sinclair Communications. The Sinclair Broadcast Group owns the largest number of local TV stations in the country, mostly throughout the South and Midwest. They last made headlines in 2004, when the company refused to allow its stations to air the Nightline segment that named American casualties in Iraq (they hate the troops!), and then six months later when they made all their stations broadcast a crazy Swift Boat documentary about how John Kerry committed treason in Vietnam. Oh, and then they were the ones behind the Armstrong Williams debacle, in which Williams was revealed to be a White House-paid propagandist while hosting a syndicated show as an ostensibly independent commentator. The show was produced out of Sinclair's "New Central" office, which produced much of the insane "news" content Sinclair feeds to its many stations. (Sinclair received a $36,000 FCC fine for their trouble.) But besides a GQ story on Sinclair back in '05, no one really pays any attention to the work of Sinclair. They reach nearly as many homes as an actual television network and purposefully exert more control over the message they broadcast than any 24-hour news network, but because they own podunk affiliates in flyover country, no one notices. Per Wikipedia:

Congratulations to Barack Obama for finally running a no-holds-barred attack ad against John McCain. It's a masterpiece of the genre (the "more in sorrow than in fearmongering" attack), taking one odd biographical detail as proof of mendacity, with a touch of underhanded smear thrown in. You are poor and broke and the bank is taking away your house, but John McCain? He is so old he doesn't remember how many houses he has! (Narrator: "It's seven. Seven houses.") It's a fun little number. But as you watch our above compilation of some of our favorite attack ads of the last forty-odd years, well, you may notice that no modern candidate can touch the '60s for mean-spirited spite. LBJ will cut you to win reelection. Click to see the compilation, and Obama's modern attempt at the genre is below.

Nothing makes us prouder to be Americans than knowing, at least, that we are free. Free specifically to post insane allegations against any media or political figure accusing them of conspiratorial scurrility on YouTube, where it will be viewed by millions of our fellow crazies and followed up by response videos even less grounded in any sort of observable reality. So you can imagine how thrilled we are that this post-modern citizen campaign work can now be showed on real tv right next to T. Boon Pickens windfarm fantasia and Obama clubbing with Paris Hilton or whatever. It's all thanks to Saysme.tv, a new service that allows your average man-on-the-street the chance to have his 25-second commercial aired in various local cable markets for a tiny, tiny fee. Listen to Saysme.tv's chief executive on how this is all about freedom:

Some shadowy 527s—and one li'l 501(c)4—with hilarious names like "Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America" and "The Legacy Committee" and "The Justice Society of a New and Safer America" bought some airtime in North Carolina to show off their gross Willie Horton-style attack ads about how Barack Obama is soft on crime. Did you know he is against the dealth penalty? It's true! You can learn all about it after the jump.

Gawker's Richard Blakeley caught this exclusive clip of Barack Obama appearing on Good Morning America to refute charges from the Clinton campaign that sometimes he dresses in funny Muslim clothes.

Remember when we said this was the best amateur Obama YouTube music video ever? We were wrong. We apologize. This is the best one ever. It is insane. It was on boingboing, but don't hold that against it. It is awesome. Ron Paul may be the President of the Internet, but Barack Obama is a living meme.