I read an interesting story by a journalist paid to join McCain's stable of fake letter-writers.
I ghost-wrote letters to the editor for the McCain campaign
The offer was too alluring to delay -- they wanted to put me into action as a ghostwriter. Next to commercials and phone banking, writing letters to the editor is the most important method of the McCain campaign to attract voters. At least that is what's written in the guidelines that McCain campaign worker Phil Tuchman presents to me.
Today he is training six ghostwriters. What on earth is the appeal of McCain for the former Soviet bloc? Last time I was here, an exuberant Polish guy was phone banking next to me. Today, a Russian in yellow suspenders is shimmering at the same table, looking just like an actor who is famous in the Netherlands for star turns as a genius who suppresses his dark side with painstaking self-control.
The assignment is simple: We are going to write letters to the editor and we are allowed to make up whatever we want -- as long as it adds to the campaign. After today we are supposed to use our free moments at home to create a flow of fictional fan mail for McCain. "Your letters," says Phil Tuchman, "will be sent to our campaign offices in battle states. Ohio. Pennsylvania. Virginia. New Hampshire. There we'll place them in local newspapers."
Place them? I may be wrong, but I thought that in the USA only a newspaper's editors decided that. "We will show your letters to our supporters in those states," explains Phil. "If they say: 'Yeah, he/she is right!' then we ask them to sign your letter. And then we send that letter to the local newspaper. That's how we send dozens of letters at once."
No newspaper can refuse a stream of articulate expressions of support, is the thought behind it. "This way, we will always get into some letters column."
Examples of the letters are here:
It could be that instead of terminating the letter-writing campaign when he lost the election, McCain refocused and redoubled his efforts, caring more about winning at any cost than about the American electoral system.
Or perhaps Bush and Cheney are trying to destabilise society in the hope that people are going to riot and give them an excust to declare martial law instead of stepping down.
Perhaps some people just hate Blacks so much they're trying to stir up enough hatred to get a good old-fashioned lynchin' going.
Whatever the cause, it's not a big issue and will soon blow over. Everything written against Obama in these threads comes down to lies, insinuations and, sometimes, simple misunderstandings.
The average voter has more important things to worry about than a bunch of persistant mud-slingers.
) I'll try to answer each of the points in the OP, maybe that
will help. Or at least help figure out what I'm missing. 
