The 500-plus Republican-related Independent Expenditure Committees (read: "hit-squads") are gearin' up to git 'er done, b'ys, an' slander's the name o' their game an' 'bama's the aim o' their frame (I'm much better at faux Newfie accents than faux Southern accents).

They will lie (Obama "soft on crime" because of his vote against expanded death penalty in Illinois; a pandering, superfluous bill and he already publicly favouring killing "heinous crime" perps), they will manufacture from whole cloth, they will exaggerate, they will attack his wife, his birthright, his citizenship, and, obliquely, his blackness.

Oh, they won't call him "Nigger", but they will do everything short of actually using the "N-word" to imply he's unfit. They will tie the slanders into his utterances and policies with invention and spin.They will try to kill him with everything short of mob lynching. They will exploit every past effort by Barack and Michelle toward racial consciousness and equality, framing it as "anti-American"; they will harp on his (admitted) youthful pot use (and isn't GWB the biggest drunk, druggie, coward chickenhawk to ever get past the barriers surrounding the White House, with the possible exception of Tommy Chong, fellow Canuck?); they will slur and slander and invent and shoot-from-the-hip and, inevitably, shoot themselves in the feet, just as the Democrats have done for the last few years.

Attack politics may not be exclusively a Conservative invention, but have been honed to such refinement by Karl Rove and Kohorts (nice, eh?) as to be almost exclusively a GOP tool.
Liberals would hardly dare use such a tool for fear of being labeled anti-something-not-politically­-correct.

Not a problem for Cons, though, as they are anti-everything-politically-co­rrect, and, ironically, that is their strength, their pander-package for the God-fearin', revert-to-the-ol'-days nostagia for a time which never really existed.

And just who are these acolytes of this scurrilous fear-mongering and rabble-rousing?
Not always who you might think. Not always the least-of-the-least, nor fundamentalist crazies here and there, nor the weak, the downtrodden, the poor.

Nope. They're you an' me an' neighbours an' smart (if delusional) people like Jack Dallas, who has a blind-spot the size of the hole in his thinking, and Skeppy, who has a hole in his thinking the size of his bigotry, and fellow Canuck EnsleyHill, who has a hole in his thinking the size of a Hockey net.
Not to mention a few insignificant others populating this board, who are just assholes.

I think President Obama inevitable, and I think his demonization by Swift Boaters guarantee of backlash, and I think his Presidency will benefit the world much more than a McCain Presidency.

Doc. RMR, ret. Canadian voter, current. American voter, almost (Google it).