President Obama’s official re-election campaign has set up a website ostensibly to defend him against false attacks, but its obvious purpose is to smear Republicans and propagandize. What could be more shameless?

Jim Messina, Obama’s re-election campaign manager, in a fundraising email announcing the website, said: “Forming the first line of defense against a barrage of misinformation won’t be easy. Our success will depend on a team of researchers and writers to stay on the lookout for false claims about the President and his record, bring you the facts, and hold our opposition accountable.”

Does any rational person believe these people anymore? They trade in lies and misinformation, and the only chance they have to re-elect Obama – and it’s still slim – is to grossly distort Obama’s record and fabricate fantasies about his opposition.

That’s what this new website is all about. It’s called “AttackWatch.com,” but it should be called “AttackDog.com.” It has already proved that in its first few days of existence. When I opened the website for the first time, I saw revolving pictures of Obama’s currently front-running GOP rivals, Rick Perry and Mitt Romney, with the accompanying captions “Rick Perry’s massive jobs lie” and “Romney’s job chart shows flawed understanding of the facts.” Glenn Beck’s photo also rotates into view with the line “Glenn Beck twists the facts on Israel.”

Do you ever remember a White House – and make no mistake about who’s behind this ruse – soliciting hordes of followers to do opposition research for it? Then again, we’ve never before had a community organizer in the Oval Office.

The pseudo-indignation of Obama’s supporters rings hollow when measured against Obama’s very mode of operation throughout his term of office. On every major issue, Obama’s practice has been to select, isolate and demonize a target, from fat cat bankers to insurance companies making obscene profits to the greedy rich who didn’t want to pay their fair share of taxes to Chrysler’s secured creditors who were slandered because they resisted his scandalous debt restructuring scheme.

The concept of this website is perversely amusing when you consider the administration’s history of manipulating the Internet for political gain. I reported in my book “Crimes Against Liberty” that the Obama-Holder Justice Department had formed a secret in-house blogging group to participate on websites to influence public opinion. Dubbed the “Blog Squad,” this political operation was operating out of the very halls of the institution dedicated to administering justice in the United States. On the taxpayers’ dime, it was paying partisan political operatives to scour the Internet for news stories, commentaries and blog posts critical of the administration’s agenda and then post comments supporting the administration – all without identifying who was behind the posts.

Some of the administration’s advisers didn’t even disguise their intent to use the Internet deceitfully for political purposes. One of Obama’s “closest confidants,” Cass Sunstein, as head of the administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, has openly advocated the government’s use of fake websites and outside 501©(3) interest groups to front as independent supporters of government policy and to – get this – “cognitively infiltrate” opposing websites.

What, you ask, is “cognitive infiltration”? That’s easy. Salon’s Glenn Greenwald – no right-wing extremist – wrote that while at Harvard Law School in 2008, Sunstein co-wrote “a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-‘independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate’ online groups and websites – as well as other activist groups – which advocate views that Sunstein deems ‘false conspiracy theories.’”

In other words, one of Obama’s right-hand men suggested that government employees masquerade as private citizens to “infiltrate” websites and try to influence public opinion as if they were just random citizens. Before you pooh-pooh this because it purports to be in opposition only to “conspiracy theories,” remember that this administration’s Justice Department used government publications to defame tea party protesters and returning veterans as conspiracy theorists, racists, religious nuts and domestic terrorists. If you think Sunstein’s proposed surreptitious activities are limited to the innocuous exposure of crazies, you have another think coming.

If Obama were to run on his actual record in office – the worst of any president in modern history – he would receive a smaller percentage of votes than any president in history. The poverty rate is at a 50-year high, and we have catastrophic unemployment, especially black unemployment, an economy near depression, a doubling of the national debt and a trail of corruption involving untold billions from Stimulus Sr., of which Solyndra is just one example.

The recent New York and Nevada elections and Obama’s ever-cratering approval ratings show how desperately he is hemorrhaging support. He has no choice but to divert our attention from the record and onto red herrings he can generate through false characterizations of his opponents. That’s what AttackWatch.com is about. That’s what the entire re-election effort is about.

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