McClatchy has a very interesting piece on dirty, dirty politics being practiced outside the campaigns and parties. One of the early pushers of the Obama-Muslim story is a retired CIA man who built a dossier and even tried to shop it to foreign intelligence services to give it credibility.
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.