I started tracking early attacks on Barack Obama last week when I pointed out that Rush Limbaugh was calling him “Odumbo.” Now, via Media Matters, the conservative pundit Debbie Schlussel is engaged in a far nastier line of attack, questioning Obama’s loyalty to this country:

So, even if [Obama] identifies strongly as a Christian, and even if he despised the behavior of his father (as Obama said on Oprah); is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and who is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as President when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam? Where will his loyalties be?

Is that even the man we’d want to be a heartbeat away from the Presidency, if Hillary Clinton offers him the Vice Presidential candidacy on her ticket (which he certainly wouldn’t turn down)?

NO WAY, JOSE . . . Or, is that, HUSSEIN?

This is the same dual loyalties smear that was used against John F. Kennedy when he was trying to become the first Catholic president. And it’s even more loathsome in this context given that we are fighting a war on terror against radical Islam. Schlussel is suggesting not just that Muslims are disloyal but that Obama, a practicing Christian, is disloyal simply as a result of the fact that his father was Muslim.