Just why do slimeballs like Sen. Mike DeWine hate America so much? Why are they trying so hard to destroy it? And are Ohio voters really that stupid?

Obviously Mike DeWine knows that if he had to run for reelection on his merits, he'd have his ass kicked if he were running against an empty box of raisins. And since he's a member in good standing of the right-wing slime machine, he sneers at his constituents, who he thinks are just morons whose only function is to keep him aboard that good Senate gravy train, to which end any kind of sleazy manipulation is considered for their own good.

So nobody should be surprised that, following the wisdom of Karl "9/11, 24/7" Rove, his campaign is perpetrating the grotesque fabrication that his Democratic challenger, Rep. Sherrod Brown, is by some bizarre, psychotic stretch of the senator's diseased imagination responsible for 9/11, or soft on terrorism, or who-knows-what, using video footage of the South Tower of the World Trade Center burning.

Unfortunately, the only thing these people know how to do is lie. So why should we be surprised to learn that even their lies are phony? As Al Kamen reports in his Washington Post "In the Loop" column:

Brown and state Democrats blasted the video, which showed the south tower billowing smoke, saying it exploited Sept. 11 and smeared Brown.

Now, it turns out, the video was doctored. Eagle-eyed reporter Bret Schulte of U.S. News & World Report said yesterday that it "looked awful, it didn't look right," and he contacted an expert who confirmed his suspicions. "The north tower was hit first," the expert told him, so "the south tower could not be burning without the north tower burning." Also, the smoke on Sept. 11, the expert said, "was never in a halo like that."

A DeWine spokesman acknowledged the image was a "graphic representation" by the firm that produced the ad, which used a still photo of the towers with computer-generated smoke added. The campaign insisted that the facts are fine and well documented, and it promised to get a new image of the towers up right away.

And, of course, DeWine did not know the image was a phony, the spokesman said, and ordered it corrected.

Of course it's the American Right that really hates America and everything it stands for, and it's the Right that's engaged in an all-out, take-no-prisoners holy war to destroy everything that's honest and decent in our society.

So the question for Ohio voters now is: Just how stupid are you?