Amid the Wall Street Journal reportage on Obama’s inner Nixon, have they forgotten HOW he was elected Senator?

WSJ Opinion:

Those are some ugly details that our Kimberley Strassel has been turning up about the effort to smear Mitt Romney’s campaign donors. The dirt-digging exercise reflects the character of President Obama’s re-election campaign, as well as what’s really behind the drive for more “transparency” in political donations.As Ms. Strassel has reported in recent columns, Idaho businessman Frank VanderSloot has become the target of a smear campaign since it was disclosed earlier this year that he had donated $1 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Romney. President Obama’s campaign website teed him up in April as one of eight “less than reputable” Romney donors and a “bitter foe of the gay rights movement.” One sin: His wife donated to an anti-gay-marriage campaign, of the kind that have passed in 30 or so states.

Now we learn that little more than a week after that Presidential posting, a former Democratic Senate staffer called the courthouse in Mr. VanderSloot’s home town of Idaho Falls seeking his divorce records. Ms. Strassel traced the operative, Michael Wolf, to a Washington, D.C. outfit called Fusion GPS that says it is “a commercial research firm.”

Fusion GPS is run by a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Glenn Simpson, who wouldn’t say who is paying him for this high-minded slumming but said in an email that Mr. VanderSloot was a “legitimate” target because of “his record on gay issues.”

If Mr. Simpson and Democrats really favor disclosure, then surely Mr. Simpson should disclose who is paying him to rummage through the personal lives of opposition donors. Someone should also ask the White House, the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee if Mr. Simpson’s chop shop is on their payroll and if they approve of such tactics. Does Mr. Obama think the lifestyles and divorce records of campaign donors should be fair political game?

Remember Jack Ryan, well ahead in the polls in Illinois, the husband of Jerri Ryan, ‘7 of 9’ on Star Trek?

Jack Ryan (born October 6, 1959) is a Republican from the state of Illinois who was forced to withdraw from the 2004 United States Senate race due to an alleged sex scandal involving his relationship with his ex-wife, actress Jeri Ryan.^[1][2] His eventual replacement, Alan Keyes, would go on to lose the general election to State Senator and future President of the United States, Barack Obama.

Ryan hoped to succeed retiring Republican Peter Fitzgerald in the United States Senate. On March 16, 2004, he won the Republican primary, thus pairing him against Democrat Barack Obama. However, after his divorce records containing damaging allegations were unsealed and made public, he withdrew his candidacy on June 25, 2004, and officially filed the documentation to withdraw on July 29, 2004.

The following week, on April 2, 2004, Barack Obama formally established his position about the Ryans’ soon-to-be-released divorce records, and called on Democrats not to inject them into the campaign. The Ryan campaign characterized Obama’s stance as hypocritical, because Obama’s alleged backers had been emailing reports about the divorce records prior to Judge Schnider’s decision

Barack Obama is not just politics as usual, he is Chicago machine politics as usual. He not hope and change he is dirty knives and questionable ethics, but of course, it’s justified and understandable because his is the greater understanding, and good.

Nothing is more important than ensuring this man’s defeat.