I realize that I’m a couple of weeks late on picking up on this, the latest absurd GOP smear of Barack Obama, but I generally try to avoid reading crap like this because, as Grandpa Simpson would say “it angries up the blood.”

But late last night, I had an email from a family member with the subject line reading: Fw: Fwd: Editorial on Obama's Questional Internet Fund Raising Campaign.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t even open an email like this. I’m not a big ‘forwards’ guy plus the misspelling in the title provided my first whiff of suspicion about what I was about to read.

But I opened it and forged ahead with the email. My family member wanted to know if I thought there was anything to this piece and I wanted to provide a well thought out response.

Clearly to appreciate my response it would be best to read the actual original email first, but I don’t want to be guilty of spreading this complete filth, so long story short, the piece was presented as a New York Times Op-Ed written by Maureen Dowd on June 29, 2008.

The general idea was that Barack Obama’s campaign cash was coming from some very questionable places like, according to the piece “Saudi Arabia, Iran and other Middle Eastern Countries.” The author went on to imply that the Obama Campaign was claiming an average donation of $15, which would require 13 million-plus donors to reach the total of $200 million which the piece claimed was Obama’s internet fund raising total.

Where were these claims coming from? Well there were no sources offered in the piece other than a nameless “insider” who was one of Obama’s “internet geeks”.

So without further ado, below the jump, is my slightly cleaned up for the website response:

Dear Family Member,

Stuff like this makes my blood boil. For starters, I am very familiar with Maureen Dowd's writing and there is not a chance that this was her work. There is not a single actual source listed in this piece and there is no chance in hell Dowd would put her good name on something with nothing to back it up. Second, and probably the most obvious falsehood in this piece, is the writer's claim that "We were told" that the average contribution to his campaign was $15. That's absurd. No where, at any point, ever have I heard anyone in the press or from within the Obama camp claim that the number is that low. What the media and the campaign have reported is that the average is somewhere in the high $90 range, sometimes jumping above $100. For $200,000,000 raised that would put the campaign at roughly 2 million donors...or exactly where they say they are. Third, Obama's campaign has run one of the most transparent fundraising operations possible. If you visit opensecrets.org, a non-partisan website which I have used for many years, they rate Obama's campaign right now at "Full Disclosure" and they have 94.1% of all his money accounted for. Yes, that is not 100%, but with new money coming in every day it is impossible to be at a full 100% all the time. Finally, if there was even a hint that there was maybe a single foreign contribution made to Obama's campaign the McCain team and the mainstream press would be absolutely all over this. It would be front page news, Chris Matthews would lead off "Hardball" with it and every McCain supporter in the country would be repeating all the talking points about it.

I went on to mention that the person who wrote this piece should probably go to jail, not only for libel against Barack Obama and his campaign, but also for the identity theft of Maureen Dowd.

What really bothers me about this type of thing is that people believe it.

This could easily develop into a thousand-word rant about exactly how angry this makes me, but instead, for my sanity’s sake I’ll end this with a plea to The Stonecipher Report readers to comment or email me at StoneTSR@gmail.com with evidence that this garbage won’t work this time around.

Oh, and for the record, Maureen Dowd did not write the piece in question, but she did talk to the Huffington Post about it and denied writing it. Here’s the Sam Stein HuffPo piece.