The open-source campaign for Obama just keeps adding more star power. We’ve never seen a campaign so comfortable letting its most passionate supporters, stars or not, take responsibility for spreading the candidate’s core message. This is advertising you could never pay for.

We’re literally seeing the rules of politics being reinvented in this campaign. I promise you, you will not have a Hillary-Clinton-In-New-Hampshire moment watching her latest, tired, fearmongering ad:

Clinton camp sends Drudge a photo of Obama in Muslim-y garb.

Drudge, surprisingly, bites the hand the fed him.

The sky is falling.
Vote your fears.

Bears a passing resemblance to this Bush classic:

The final accounting of the hundreds of false administration statements that led us into war with Iraq has been assembled by the inestimable Center for Public Integrity.

Per their numbers, George Bush made 28 statements falsely linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, inarguably the most explosive — and least defensible — claim in the run up to war.

Bush, Cheney & Co. were not alone in pushing this falsehood. They got an invaluable assist from Senator Hillary Clinton, who echoed their claim in her October 2002 floor speech before her vote “with confidence” to authorize the war:

There was never any proof for this claim of a link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Indeed, this alleged relationship was explicitly debunked in the National Intelligence Estimate… the one that the New York Senator never bothered to read before she voted:

From the New York Times:

In fact, the classified reports available to all senators at the time found that Iraq was not allied with Al Qaeda, and that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden harbored feelings of deep mistrust and enmity for each other… In an interview, [Former Florida Senator] Bob Graham said: “I don’t think any agency pretended to make a case that there was a strong linkage between Saddam Hussein and 9/11. It wasn’t in the N.I.E.”

Maybe Hillary got snowed on the question of Iraq’s WMD. A lot of decent people did.

But she went out on a limb to promote the non-existent connections between Saddam and Al Qaeda — and in so doing participated in the snowing of America.

Clinton’s crying video is getting a lot of attention this morning, less so her rather stunning fearmongering attack on Obama.

Ignore the choked up voice for a second and pay attention to the words:

“Some of us are right, and some of us are wrong.”

“Some of us are ready, and some of us are not.”

“When we look at the array of problems that we have — and the potential for it really … spinning out of control — this is one of the most important elections we’ve ever faced.”

Shorter Clinton: Fear the Rookie.

UPDATE: Here’s the video

At least his candidacy is going out with a — bang.

“The Republican Party has won two elections on the issue of fear and terrorism. They’re going to try again.” —Retiring Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska)

It’s hard to pick out the most troubling part of Rudy’s Foreign Affairs prowar manifesto, Toward a Realistic Peace, which puts Bush’s with-us-or-against-us doctrine on the express bus to Crazy Town: “The era of cost-free anti-Americanism must end.”

But let’s stick with Rudy’s most obvious piece of lunatic revisionism, about how we snatched defeat from the jaws of imminent victory in Vietnam:

Many historians today believe that by about 1972 we and our South Vietnamese partners had succeeded in defeating the Vietcong insurgency and in setting South Vietnam on a path to political self-sufficiency. But America then withdrew its support, allowing the communist North to conquer the South.

Question: Who among these “many historians” is not a resident scholar at the neocon temple, AEI?

The whole thing reads like a report on world politics written by a 10th grader who was home schooled by Richard Perle:

The world is a dangerous place. We cannot afford to indulge any illusions about the enemies we face. The Terrorists’ War on Us was encouraged by unrealistic and inconsistent actions taken in response to terrorist attacks in the past. A realistic peace can only be achieved through strength.

Makes Mitt “Double Guantanamo” Romney sound like Richard Hofstadter.