Hmmm.  Didn’t Barack Obama just get done scolding John McCain over “dishonorable” attacks?  Maybe he should save his criticisms for his surrogates, except that they’re parroting The One in his own baseless smears.  In Iowa today, Kathleen Sebelius continued the Obama tradition of calling Republicans racists, and the other Obama tradition of producing absolutely no evidence for the allegation:

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius accused Republicans on Tuesday of injecting race into the presidential campaign, arguing that they are using “code language” to convince Midwesterners that Democrat Barack Obama is different from them.

“Have any of you noticed that Barack Obama is part African-American?” Sebelius asked with sarcasm. “(Republicans) are not going to go lightly into the darkness.”

Sebelius was responding to a question from the audience at the Iowa City Public Library about the tenacity of Democrats and whether they would fight for victory as hard as Republicans in the closing weeks of the election.

She did not elaborate on her comment.

Well, they don’t usually elaborate, because they don’t have any evidence of it.  It’s a smear, and has been shown thus by the Washington Post and ABC News during the summer.  And while Obama whines about McCain’s supposed lies, the purveyor of Hope and Change has been throwing mud at McCain ever since locking up the nomination.

There is nothing more dishonorable in politics than calling opponents “racists” without evidence.  It not only smears people who have tried to keep race out of the election, it is a McCarthyite tactic to silence critics.  It reveals in another fashion Obama’s Nixonian tendencies in reacting to any sort of criticism at all — shouting it down, smearing journalists doing their jobs, and branding any dissent from the One’s revealed wisdom as based on hate rather than genuine opposition to statist policies.

Kathleen Sebelius has decided to enable that kind of McCarthyism and mudslinging, without having the courage to provide an iota of evidence for it.  Perhaps Obama should have chosen her for a running mate; they appear to have the same perspective and philosophy, as well as sharing an ethical standard so low as to be invisible to the naked eye.

Update: The AP or the Miami Herald has edited this article to remove the “(Republicans) will not go lightly into the darkness” quote.  Fortunately, I saved a cached version of the article here.  It now reads:

Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius said Tuesday that a belief among some voters that Democrat Barack Obama is different from them is hindering his campaign for president.

Asked at a brown-bag lunch at the local library why the campaign is neck-and-neck, Sebelius said “code language” raising doubts about Obama is invalid because his life experience “has a lot more to do with me and my family.”

“I think that the notion that, ‘By the way, have any of you noticed that Barack Obama is part African American?’ I think that is for a number of people difficult,” Sebelius said. “I think we need to talk about the fact that that is a real issue.”

Why did this story get changed?  Did someone at the AP or Herald decide that it made the smear tactics just too obvious?  Clearly, someone got second thoughts about including that quote from Sebelius, and either the AP or the Herald need to explain their sanitation of Sebelius’ remarks.