It wasn’t that long ago that Bob Kerry, former senator from Nebraska and now president of the New School, had to apologize up and down for using Obama’s full name – Barack Hussein Obama – when complimenting Obama even as he was endorsing Hillary.

“Everyone,” at the time, said using Obama’s middle name was a backhanded “smear.”

But in Frank Rich’s Sunday column in The New York Times (Feb. 24), Rich did the unthinkable: He called the candidate by his full name, “Barack Hussein Obama,” just as Kerrey did.

Granted, Rich wasn’t trying to smear, but neither was the apologetic Kerrey. If, according to the smear police, the name “Hussein” is so poisonous, why did Rich mention it in any context?

Should Rich be forced to apologize, as did Kerrey? The room is quiet. There are no winged monkeys carrying Rich away.

At the Academy Awards, that very same Sunday, Jon Stewart joked, “You have to give Barack Obama credit, he's overcome a great deal.

Not just he's an African-American. Barack Hussein Obama is his name.
His middle name is the last name of Iraq's former tyrant. His last name rhymes with Osama. That's not easy to overcome. I think we all remember the ill-fated 1944 presidential campaign of Gaydolf Titler. It's just a shame; Titler had so many good ideas. We just couldn't get past the name. And the moustache."

Over at the Daily Kos, the radical leftist – and sometimes anti-Semitic -- blog that is the engine behind so much political malice, Tom Rinaldo (Feb 25) called Stewart “disgusting and repulsive.”

Says Rinaldo, “Jon Stewart just took the malicious racial and religious smears that the Right Wing will try to use to bring Obama down and made them viral. He openly injected America's fear of Islamic extremist terrorists directly into the 2008 Democratic Presidential contest, going so far as to throw in a thinly veiled direct comparison between Barack Obama and Adolph Hitler on top of it. And he chose to do so on a mainstream TV network - not the piddly Comedy Channel, when Stewart knew that hundreds of millions of people of every political persuasion, from all walks of live, would intently watch and hear him do so.”

But only the radical leftists at the Daily Kos seemed to care. That’s a sign of our communal health. A few weeks ago, leaders from (let’s see if you remember all nine) United Jewish Communities; the OU; the ADL; the AJCongress; the AJCommittee; the Simon Wiesenthal Center; the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism; the National Council of Jewish Women; and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs signed a joint letter expressing how aghast they were about some unsigned crank “smear” e-mails that spread misinformation about Obama’s Islamic connections, insinuating that the highly sophisticated Jewish electorate might be gullible enough to fall for unsigned trash.

From an unsigned e-mail to The New York Times: Last Sunday, Rich printed Obama’s middle name and the republic still stands. We can laugh at Stewart’s Obama, Hitler and Osama jokes, without Jewish scolds getting apoplectic as they would have if an anonymous e-mailer joked about Barack Gaydolf Titler back in January.

Here, at February’s end, only the cranks at the Daily Kos, and their Jewish confederates, still care.

If anyone has been smeared in recent weeks it has been the Jewish community, charged with intolerance for raising any question about Obama at all. (Even though exit polling during the primaries produced no evidence of Jewish intolerance to justify this excessive and ongoing story that has given us more innuendo than information).

In American justice, anonymous e-mails aren’t evidence of anything. For Obama’s Jewish McCarthyists, anonymous e-mails are evidence of everything.

Here’s a question for the lingering smear police: Why do non-racists, such as Ralph Nader, and the non-Jewish Palestinians at “Electronic Intifada,” say Obama was “pro-Palestinian” before Obama entered national politics?

The Obama campaign has exposed a stain on Jewish leadership and Jewish journalism. Too many of us, in too many organizations, in too many papers, seem more interested in protecting Obama than in protecting the Jewish street. We were more interested in keeping afloat the partisan smear of Jewish racial and ethnic intolerance, rather than exposing the shallowness of those accusations, which is what Jewish leaders and Jewish journalists would have done if our allegiance was to our people rather than to party.