The only thing that would've surprised me in your response would be if you'd failed to dismiss snopes.com as biased. That was as predictable as the sun rising in the east.

The phenomenon is so widespread that there are hundreds of Web sites devoted to debunking these hoaxes. For example:

http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org/ (currently down, promises to be back soon)
http://www.truthorfiction.com/
http://urbanlegends.about.com/

HoaxBusters is pretty good, when it's on the air, and I've consulted them before to cross-check snopes. The other two have extensive lists of these things, and based on a skim of the headlines, they all document pretty much the same set of email hoaxes. On these sites as well as snopes, anti-Democrat smears overwhelmingly outnumber anti-Republican smears.

Yeah, yeah, I know, they're biased too. So I'll lower the bar just for you: Find me one clearly unbiased site that presents a different mix of email hoaxes, showing Democrats even at parity with Republicans in the smear game.

I'm focusing on circulating email hoaxes because they represent the closest thing to a grassroots phenomenon that you can find these days. Stipulating, for the sake of argument, that the RNC isn't writing these things, they arise spontaneously from the tortured imaginations of Wingers, who send them to other Wingers who gleefully pass them along. I witness this firsthand, and I post some of what I see. If, for your part, you're aware of a corresponding phenomenon on the Democratic side, say so and give your own examples.

I just did a couple of Google searches on the phrases "democratic smear campaign" and "republican smear campaign". 492 hits for "democratic smear campaign", "republican smear campaign" got 2,980. Cracked me up that the #1 hit for "republican smear campaign" was my post starting this thread, #2 was my post from last year on the same topic; only difference is I used "begins" a year ago, "continues" this time.

The gauntlets are piling up...