Sean Hannity has been spewing a lot of venom about the Obama campaign lately, calling it, with a perfectly straight face, one of the dirtiest in American history. On Sunday he did a whole special on the dirtiness of Obama’s campaign, including a smear profile of deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, whom he called the “driving force behind the hateful tone that has been spewing from Team Obama and its surrogates.” He was back on the same theme last night along with Michelle Malkin who raised the tone of the Romney campaign no end by calling Cutter a “shameless lying liar.” 

Among Hannity’s specific accusations against Cutter was on a theme he's used before: that though she denied having anything to do with the “Priorities USA” ad featuring Joe Soptic, whose wife died of cancer after her workplace was closed by Bain Capital, she was heard participating in a conference call with Soptic. (He doesn’t say which of those events came first.) That was when Malkin came out with her “shameless lying liar” statement, adding, “You need to have two feet of clearance space for that nose that keeps growing and growing, Stephanie Cutterocchio.”

Another specific accusation, and one they spent the most time on: that Cutter said women didn`t care about the economy. What made them say that, gentle reader? It was this quote from Cutter: “Well, … you find most often with women, they're not really concerned about what's happened over the last -- what's happened over the last four years. They really want to know what's going to happen in the next four years.”

Did you see the word “economy” in that sentence, gentle reader? Neither did I. In fact, that sentence turns out to have been cherry-picked from a much longer quote, and one that plainly says women are concerned about broader issues.  But it gave Malkin a perfect opportunity for a rant. “Here [Cutter] is now, trying to persuade women that they should forget the last four years, down the memory hole, all those millions of women who were out of work, all the millions of female taxpayers whose money has been squandered on crony projects and boondoggles. And she so blithely blabs and blabs about the war on women when of course it's this administration that has waged it, most ruthlessly on mothers, grandmothers, daughters, sisters of all the men who have lost their jobs and who are far less better off than they were four years ago…” (Hannity – I’ll give him that much credit – did remind her that women had lost their jobs too.)

I didn't see any mention of birth control in Cutter's incriminating statement either, but that didn't stop Malkin from bringing it up. The Democrats, she said, had overreached by going after the loony feminist fringe “in this whole idea that women simply think with their chromosomes and internal organs… and the caricature of the Sandra Fluke typos, radical pinkos, prancing around in costumes dressed up as reproductive organs. This is not what mainstream females are about. We need to have the Romney campaign representing that.” (Then why are mainstream females not flocking to Romney? Oh yes, of course - it's those left-wing polls misrepresenting things again.)

Is Fox upset because the Obama campaign is refusing to roll over when the right-wing attack ads begin? I have my own idea about who’s really running the dirty campaign, gentle reader.