The YouTube at left is the original CNN attempt at "debunking" some of the idiotic Obama e-mail smears -- my favorite part is Howie Kurtz saying that the way the media works these days is to run with unsourced internet smear rumors, and then backtrack to determine their veracity after the information is already "out there." Journamalism at its finest, eh?

McClatchy shows how this ought to be done, getting to the heart of who is fronting out the inaccurate smear e-mails by doing some real, live journalism:

Some things about Barack Obama rub some voters the wrong way.

"We don't need a Muslim," said Jannay Smith, a retiree from Kokomo, Ind. "Who's to say if he gets in there what he'll do?"

Added Steve Shallenberger, a Kokomo electrician: "He's just calling himself a Christian because he knows that's what we in Indiana want to hear."

Then there's Sherry Richey, also from Kokomo: "He wouldn't put his hand on the Bible; he wanted the Quran. He won't put his hand over his heart during the anthem or say the Pledge of Allegiance. He's too un-American."

All of these slurs on Obama are categorically untrue....

One practitioner in Virginia, who hates Obama like a dog hates cats, led a reporter through his efforts. Because the man is a retired clandestine CIA officer, identifying him could endanger officers or operations that remain classified, so McClatchy will not reveal his name.

In late 2006, convinced that an Obama presidency would be disastrous for America, he decided to start an anti-Obama operation. He combed the public record on Obama. He used a couple of allies and informants — half-jokingly dubbing his group "The Crusaders" — to learn about Obama's background, especially his Africa connection and how he came to be the editor of the Harvard Law Review.

He assembled a dossier on Obama, including allegations that Obama attended a madrassa, or Islamic religious school, in his youth in Indonesia.

Then the retired spook tried to get Israeli intelligence officials interested in his Obama dossier. They weren't, to his chagrin. He also shopped it to some foreign reporters. Again, no luck.

He wound up posting some of it on a blog — and where it went from there in the vast world of cyberspace is anybody's guess.

But a few months after the man began his work, the allegation that Obama was educated in a madrassa appeared in an anonymous article in Insight Magazine, an online publication of the Unification Church, in January 2007. It also claimed that Clinton operatives had dug up the information. The article was cited by several conservative commentators, including on Fox News, before it was debunked.

The piece had the markings of what's called a "false-flag" operation: Make a covert operation appear to be the work of another party. And, like many misinformation campaigns, it "takes what you might believe without any factual basis and seen circulating around ...a lot of speculation spun into a story," said Vince Cannistraro, a former CIA official.

The GOP e-mail folks have been practicing the art of lying, false flag rumor-mongering for quite some time. This is not anything new. But their level of success this time has as much to do with the Fox News willingness to front out their e-mail rumors on a larger media platform without bothering to fact check, and the rest of the media's willingness to then go along with it because it's "out there."

Here's a thought: double check it yourself BEFORE you print or report it. Or would that be too close to journalism for comfort?