... people rely on a rule of thumb to separate truth from fiction. If something sounds familiar to us, we conclude that it's true.

Oh, the irony of reading this from Farhad Manjoo.

He's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't. I'll take a pass on your concern, and instead be deeply grateful that we've got a candidate who'll actually fight back this time.

An official Obama site is requesting users' email passwords for access to their private address books? That's a pernicious rumor and a smear in its own right if it isn't true. Will someone please point to a link or an image? All I see is a space to enter the email addresses of friends to mass-mail.

Care to explain the irony you see?

On this page, click "Load contacts from your address book" on the right side of the page.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/invite/christian

Why? It's on the TV, it's a story. It has become a story as much as the smears.

There's no way to prevent stupid people from being stupid but one can do much to swamp them with accurate information. Even Fox has run this story repeatedly. It certainly doesn't help tp take the high road like John Kerry.

Do you spot the obvious flaw in this strategy? Right: People who love Obama enough to visit his Web site -- enough to give him their e-mail password! -- are unlikely to have many friends who need setting straight.

Are you kidding? Maybe in your little world. made up of similarly (identical?) fractured personalities, this might be the case. But out here, where the tech-savvy 'adults' live, we have 'friends' and acquaintances of all sorts of political persuasions.

As well, many of us belong to large networking sites, where people have access to messaging/email, and the gullibility, or political leanings, of these bodies of individuals is NOT the criteria upon which the 'membership' is built. What that means, is this: The viral, negative, fallacious rumor/emails can get passed around to huge numbers of individuals, IRRESPECTIVE of political persuasion (or ability to rationalize or think).

Do you get it, yet, there, Farjad? If not, I would suggest exposing yourself to fora that include people who don't already think like, act like, buy like... yourself. Mix it up, in other words. You might learn something, about diversity, and the benefits of engaging those with malformed, or poorly thought-out opinions, as a side benefit.

Sure, some people will be effected by hearing the rumors, but they were already the low information anti-Obama voters. Rumors only affect races around the edges; they're the sort of thing that could flip something like Florida in 2000, but not a more normal race.

My feeling about things like the Muslim rumor and even the Swiftboat ads is that they give pundits something to talk about to fill air time. You can't say, "I have no idea why this election went the way it did," so you find something shiny and assume that was to blame.

There are far too many college-educated, urban whites who believe the Obama is a Muslim lie, as well as many others. I'm at a loss of how to handle the misinformation! I could carry peer-reviewed journal articles with extensive research on Obama's past, reels of every piece of footage ever taken of Michelle Obama (indicating that she never gave a racist speech), and Obama's actual original birth certificate and it would never be enough for these people who are only looking for excuses that don't sound racist in order to give reasons why they will never, ever vote for a Black man. Ever! With apologies to The Onion... I'm suffering from an acute case of Outrage Fatigue.

why don't you do what you do best...rhapsodize on what a great guy John McCain is....

and let him benefit from your useless advise.

I could carry peer-reviewed journal articles with extensive research on Obama's past, reels of every piece of footage ever taken of Michelle Obama (indicating that she never gave a racist speech), and Obama's actual original birth certificate and it would never be enough for these people who are only looking for excuses that don't sound racist in order to give reasons why they will never, ever vote for a Black man. Ever!

The rumors are a smokescreen. Refute them. Don't refute them. It doesn't matter that much. The anti-Obama people weren't going to vote for him even without the rumor but the stuff they spread is all weak enough that it's not going to convince many people who weren't already in that camp.

According to the Pew poll, only 5 percent of college grads fit into that category. http://people-press.org/report/?pageid=1277

No matter what democrats do, whether they defend themselves or let themselves be taken to the cleaners by the right wing smear machine, someone in the Media will ALWAYS find a way to spin it negatively for the democrats. Don't LISTEN to them. Just keep the anti smear sites, emails, and comments going. FIGHT BACK! DESTROY the mean spirited, incompetent, right wing conspiracy NOW!!!!

Thanks for this thoughtful piece, but I don't think the main function of the website will be to educate the people who believe the lies, it will be to keep Obama's supporters fired up and connected to the campaign during the dog days between primaries and convention. The people who are passing on the Muslim rumor or inclined to believe it are never going to vote for Obama anyway, and he knows it. But if his people are reminded that nasty things are being said about their candidate and are given a way to channel their outrage into fighting back, they're that much more likely to take other steps to get involved in the campaign--and the already huge Obama email network gets bigger. It's just like the Christian Right's insistence that they're discriminated against by a secular, liberal world, or the Clinton "sexism" argument. No one on the other side is going to change his or her mind because of it, but it rallies the troops.