The stench of the recent Obama-Clinton story is beginning to evaporate. If you happened to miss it (lucky you), Candace hosted a very good discussion. Briefly, an online conservative rag carried an unsigned article which claimed that anonymous “source” was said to have revealed that Clinton’s camp was preparing to “reveal” information about Obama’s Muslim childhood.

There were several things wrong with that story: the anonymity of all sources, the absence of a byline for the article in Insight, the general clumsiness of it all, carefully vague phrasing to avoid libel, and most notably the fact that none of the information it contained was secret. It had all the earmarks of a classic bank shot - an attack ostensibly aimed at one target but actually intended to damage another; and that’s what most reasonable observers concluded after a day or so. Some Republican slime artist out there was warming up the Shit Machine.

The stench may be dissipating, but the stain lingers on. And that’s the real point of an attack like this. The Shit Machine doesn’t try to present a defensible argument: it simply creates a vague impression of wrongdoing, a kind of miasma in which people remember that something bad happened, but no-one quite remembers what.

Here’s a template for the ideologues who want to try it, and a mental vaccine for those who want to avoid being taken in.

Step One: Make a vague, unsourced allegation about your target. “Anonymous sources formerly employed at 24 Sussex Drive claim to have video of evidence of highly unusual late night activities involving the current occupant, two burly RCMP constables, a baby seal, a quart of Haagen Daaz Chunky Monkey, six Canadian Tire bungee cords, and a pair of battery-operated zircon-encrusted tweezers.”

Step Two:Sit back and wait for the indignant denials. These simply keep your ridiculous story alive for a couple of days and distribute it more widely.

Step Three: Come to a calm, piously “balanced” conclusion. Point out that there appear to be different “versions” of the event being offered. (That’s always a good one. One version - the truth - is that it never happened. But using the notion of “versions” suggests that something MUST have gone on.) Give equal weight to the accusation and the denial, as though both had equal merit. Conclude that “we’ll never really know the truth”.

Step Four: In the months to come, refer frequently to the “Night of the Tweezers”: keep the image and the story alive, but always hasten to add that “nothing has ever been conclusively proven either way.” That will enhance your reputation for fairness, while giving the lie a little more mileage.

And thus your little fabrication enters the political mythology, not as a fact, but as a vaguely remembered bad smell linked to your political target. It doesn’t matter that the Clintons were never even charged with anything Whitewater-related, or that Brian Mulroney was completely exonerated of any wrongoing in the so-called “Airbus Scandal”… the only thing most of us remember is that something bad happened. And they must have been partly to blame, right? I mean, there was a “scandal”, wasn’t there?

The masters of the Shit Machine have traditionally been American - Lee Atwater, James Carville, Karl Rove - but they have a few eager Canadian apprentices (who’s that guy who plays with Shit From Hell?), and I expect in the months to come we’ll see more and more Canadian variations on the same sad, sick theme.