I once asked Atilla why he gets so much pleasure in reading and distributing such obvious bullshit, and his reply was classic Winger: At the intellectual level he knows that this stuff is a pack of lies, but at the emotional level feels justified in promoting the smears due to the usual incoherent pastiche of Winger grievances, basically amounting to "the Democrats made me do it". The ends justify the means--it really is all about trying to damage a Democrat by any means possible, fair or foul.

Atilla doesn't write these things himself, and each forwarded message comes in with a long list of email addresses of people who've forwarded it so far, and they go out to a large distribution list. This isn't an isolated phenomenon, but so widespread that people like snopes.com can make a living debunking the smears.

Speaking of snopes.com, before you launch into the obligatory rebuttal that Democrats engage in this sort of thing equally, you might want to browse their Politics section. You'll find a few lies told about Republicans, but look at the list carefully and note the context of various lies. In the section on GWBush, for example, most of the items marked false involve a positive anecdote about Bush, such as claims that he paid for a child's funeral or spent 30 minutes talking about Jesus to some teenager. It seems that Republicans don't lie just to smear Democrats, they lie to build up their own too.

Just to reiterate, I'm not claiming that Democrats don't engage in this despicable practice too. But there's no false symmetry--Democrats seem to engage in smears less, and when they do, they tend to stay closer to the truth than Republicans.

The gauntlet is dropped. Prove me wrong, Tom.