Truth Fights Back, just not too well (John Kerry on anti-Obama smears)

John Kerry's "Campaign for Our Country" has started a new website called Truth Fights Back (truthfightsback.com), and it's pretty bad. For instance, consider the post "Barack Obama is not aligned with Weather Underground", which combines 3rd-grade-level writing with 3rd-grade-level thinking. This is the "smear" (truthfightsback.com/site/smear/200):

Republicans have repeatedly pushed a bogus story about William Ayers, a member of the 60s-era Weather Underground. They make all sorts of bogus claims about his association with Barack Obama and repeatedly try to make the connection between the two stronger.

And, this is the supposed counterattack:

Barack Obama has very little connection to William Ayers. Barack Obama served on the board of a non-profit in Chicago. This non-profit also asked Ayers, now a professor at the University of Chicago, to serve on the board. Obama had nothing to do with his inclusion on the board. Very early in his career, Barack Obama attended one event at Ayer's house, organized for Obama. This was over a decade ago.

Needless to say, there's more to it: link, americanthinker.com/blog/2008/04/finally_the_media_discovers_ob.html

They also discuss the recent Jerome Corsi book (truthfightsback.com/site/smear/236), linking to Media Matter's supposed debunking article (mediamatters.org/items/200808040005). While some of the points MMFA makes are worrisome, most are indeed rather trivial.

Their entry on Obama's Global Poverty Act combines some debunking with a lot of disingenuousness (truthfightsback.com/site/smear/230). The RNC sent out a fundraising letter which is apparently excerpted at crooksandliars.com/2008/08/07/the-lunatics-are-running-the-rncs-asylum:

A bill he has sponsored in the U.S. Senate, the so-called Global Poverty Act
(S. 2433), would raise the amount of American tax dollars allocated to United Nations’ redistribution efforts to $845 billion.

FTS correctly points out that that's not accurate: the bill would only spend $1 million. But, they're disingenuous in pretending that that's all it would do:

Obama does sponsor the Global Poverty Act (S. 2433), an attempt to focus on one of the largest contributors to global instability. However, it simply asks for a refocusing of resources toward this goal, not new spending, essentially mandating more efficiency and focus in meeting this huge problem. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that "implementing S. 2433 would cost less than $1 million per year." It would, therefore, take 8,450 years for the Global Poverty Act to spend the money the RNC claims it would spend.

The DNC (draft) position is to support those MDGs, and Obama wants to meet those goals as well. That is going to require an outlay of billions of dollars, even if only $1 million is spent on the study and the like initially.

FTS also has a rather interesting commenting policy, straight outta Moscow:

TruthFightsBack.com has a strict commenting policy. This is a site for debunking false attacks and misleading smears against Democrats. If you are not interested in that goal, please feel free to comment elsewhere. And due to the emotional nature of the subject matter, we have a few rules that go farther than we would on a normal blog to try to keep the vitriol lower than otherwise possible. We have a goal of finding and spreading the truth, not in attacking others. To further that goal, these behaviors will not be tolerated in comments:
* furthering and amplifying the smears against Democrats
* attacking other posters
* profanity directed at any other poster
* smears against Republicans
* off-topic remarks for their own sake