Pro-McCain Jewish group smearing Obama, Brzezinski

There’s been quite a flurry in the blogosphere over some well-authenticated reports that the Republican Jewish Coalition has been conducting a poll of Jewish voters in selected states in which the pollsters request responses to some blatantly untrue statements about Barack Obama and others, including Pres. Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Jonathan Cohn of TNR’s The Plank blogged the details of the call he received, which was from a company claiming to be simply a netural polling company.
He wrote:

The caller ran through a list of politicians, to ask whether I viewed them favorably or unfavorably. All the people you’d expect were on the list: George W. Bush. Barack Obama. John McCain. Sarah Palin. Hillary Clinton. Joe Biden. Joe Lieberman.
But then there was an odd inclusion: Jimmy Carter.
I can’t say I made much of it at the time…
But soon enough I understood why they were asking about Carter. After going over some more issues and confirming the fact that I was likely to vote for Obama, the caller made a series of rather pointed inquiries. Would it affect my vote, he said, if I knew that
Obama has had a decade long relationship with pro-Palestinian leaders in Chicago
the leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yousef, expressed support for Obama and his hope for Obama’s victory
the church Barack Obama has attended is known for its anti-Israel and anti-American remarks
Jimmy Carter’s anti-Israel national security advisor is one of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisors
Barack Obama was the member of a board (sic) that funded a pro-Palestinian chartiable organization
Barack Obama called for holding a summit of Muslim nations excluding Israel if elected president

My notes are pretty close to verbatim. (I started typing as soon as I realized I was getting polled.) When the caller was finished, I got a supervisor on the phone and asked if he would tell me who was sponsoring the survey. He said he couldn’t reveal that information.
All he would tell me was that he was calling from Central Marketing Research Inc. in New York City…

So this morning, there was a small demonstration of outraged pro-Obama Jewish Americans outside the Manhattan HQ of Central Marketing Research. And later today, according to Ben Smith of Politico, the Republican Jewish Committee ‘fessed up to the fact that it had commissioned this “poll.”
David Kurtz of TPM considered the question as to whether this was what’s called a “push poll”– that is, an interrogation designed not to test the views of potential voters but to plant certain smears in their minds about opposing candidates. He concluded that they probably weren’t “push polls” at all, but perhaps polls designed to test-run some negative messages that the RJC or the McCain campaign might be planning. However, Kurtz’s major argument on this point had to do with the relative costs of the two different kinds of interrogation:

The easiest way to tell which is which is by how long the call lasts. If you’re trying to reach a large number of voters, you keep the calls short and dirty: plant the seed of the smear and move on; otherwise, the costs of phone calls becomes prohibitive. The accounts so far are of calls that last upwards of 15 minutes.

But what if the organization running the polling has stacks of money and is dealing with a fairly sophisticated audience in which a quick-and-dirty operation of planting the smear and moving on could be far less effective than conducting a poll that seemed to be serious, objective, and in-depth before it moved to the smear-planting? How would you tell the difference then?
And the smears certainly have been planted, and have been reverberating for a good chunk of the day around the blogosphere.
.. Including the smear that Carter’s national security adviser Zbig Brzezinski, can appropriately be labeled as “anti-Israel.”
Excuse me????
For example, in Ben Smith’s Politico article, he repeats the entire list of questions that Jonathan Cohn wrote down, as noted above, including the one about “Jimmy Carter’s anti-Israel national security adviser.” Then Smith writes:

Most of [these] statements are true, at least in part. Obama was friendly with pro-Palestinian leaders in Chicago in his early days in politics, but they denounced him years ago for his support of Israel. Obama’s church bulletin ran articles sympathetic to the Palestinian cause; Brzezinski is an informal advisor to Obama; the Woods Fund, whose board he served on, gave a grant to a community center in Chicago founded by Palestinian activists; and he did propose a summit of Muslim nations.

Thus, Smith left quite unchallenged the proposition that Brzezinski is somehow “anti-Israel.” (He and most other US bloggers also left unchallenged the assertion that Ahmed Youssef is “the leader of Hamas.” These guys are all so incredibly ignorant about Palestinian politics, and they don’t even realize how ignorant they reveal themselves to be!)
So let’s just think about a few salient facts about Brzezinski, and Carter, and the policies that the two of them oversaw when Carter was president… Including the fact that that was the team that brokered Israel’s first-ever peace agreement with an Arab country… And not just any Arab country, but Egypt, which is by far the most strategically weighty Arab country of all, and whose enmity to Israel had been the dominant fact of Israel’s strategic geography from 1948 through 1978.
“Flipping” Egypt from a stance of hostility to Israel to one of full, formal peace with Israel transformed Israel’s strategic position overnight. But Smith and others let stand in their writings the idea that Brzezinski is somehow “anti-Israel”?
(Full disclosure: Back in the day Bill the spouse was Brzezinski’s staff person on Arab-Israeli issues and was deeply involved in his very successful peace diplomacy.)
Sadly, when Pres. Clinton came into office in 1993, the pro-Israeli operatives who surrounded him persuaded him to have nothing at all to do with anyone who’d worked on Jimmy Carter’s successful Arab-Israeli diplomacy. Instead he relied on Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, and all those other pro-AIPAC ideologues, who thereupon proceeded to waste nearly all the great opportunities Jim Baker and the Norwegians handed them for further peacemaking breakthroughs… One of the few things those ideologues succeeded in doing, however, was planting in the minds even of many Democrats that Brzezinski had somehow been “anti-Israel.” What utter nonsense.
Well, it’s interesting to see that the Republican Jewish Committee has been forced to stoop to such low tactics as these phone calls purporting to be neutral “opinion research” that oh, by the way, just along the way have the effect of spreading so many blatant untruths about Obama, and Brzezinski, and others.
Let’s hope that means that the RJC is actually getting pretty desperate?