The left's strategy for smearing Republicans and conservatives is, from all appearances, to "throw anything and everything out there, not matter how false or outrageous, and see what sticks."
A major reason why this strategy works is that the establishment press ignores bogus leftist smear attempts which should be utterly embarrassing, effectively eliminating the strategy's downside. Take Debbie Wasserman Schultz's Monday press release on 2016 GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio's fundraiser at the home of Dallas businessman Harlan Crow.
Schultz made an issue of the contents of a small portion of Crow's extensive collection of historic memorabilia:
Note the DNC chair's reference to the Holocaust.
One thing the left can count on is the Politico posting such a smear as a trial balloon. The web site's Nick Gass came through like a champ Monday afternoon. Gass used his first four paragraphs to essentially relay Schultz's press release, devoted the next paragraph to the Republican National Committee's response, and waited until Paragraph 6 to provide anything resembling context (link is in original; bolds are mine):
Crow's art collection also includes works from Monet, Renoir, Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as busts of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu and others. In a Dallas Morning News article from earlier this year, Crow said the intent of his collection was not to celebrate repressive regimes but rather to preserve history.
Well, it's more than "to preserve history," as Crow explained in the DMN article. James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web identified what Crow's collection is about and called out Schultz's irresponsibility:
... In attempting to score points against Rubio, then, Wasserman Schultz perpetrates an outrageous smear against a private citizen.
... Further, while there are certainly people who acquire Nazi memorabilia for invidious reasons, there are also plenty of collections that focus on the Nazi period with a clear-eyed sense of right and wrong and a purpose identical to Crow’s — to ensure that history is not forgotten.
"To ensure that history is not forgotten." That's what the Holocaust Museum is all about, isn't it?
On Wednesday, Michael Barone called out the DNC chair for perpetrating "a vile cheap shot."
Friday morning, as noted by Curtis Houck at NewsBusters, Fox News's Bill O'Reilly called for Schultz to resign as DNC chair:
By attacking Rubio using the Holocaust, the head of the DNC has shamed herself and her party. She should immediately resign. There comes a point when politics gets so dirty it corrupts the nation. We are at this point.
If a Republican National Committee had engaged in such recklessness, the calls for resignation wouldn't be coming from a few center-right media members. They'd be coming from Democratic Party through their apparatchiks in the press, particularly first the Associated Press and the New York Times, and then at the outlets who follow their lead. But in this case, searches on "Rubio Schultz" (not in quotes) return nothing and nothing relevant, respectively.
So when the Politico's trial balloon got shot down and didn't go anywhere, the rest of the establishment press pretended that the DNC's smear, which to any objective observer should be considered news, didn't exist — which explains why the same search at Google News returns almost no national establishment press results among its roughly 50 relevant items.
This is why the left's "throw anything and everything out there and see what sticks" strategy is viable. There's little if any downside to engaging in breathtakingly irresponsible behavior. We are "at this point" identified by O'Reilly precisely because of the nation's unfair and unbalanced press.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
