They say you can tell a lot about a person by the company he keeps. And they say you can tell a lot about a politician by the donors he loves. In fairness, any politician can get money from rather unsavory sources, but when patterns emerge you can tell what a politician is like by the donor company he or she keeps.

If this holds true for Mitt Romney it would make him a push-polling, SwiftBoat-lying, racist, immigrant-hating, Hitler-using candidate.

Allow us to explain.

On our "Smoking Politics Radio Show" we just sent a simple message to Mitt Romney, and a fair one too:

Give SwiftBoat Donor Sam Fox his $100,000 back.

Sam Fox (now our Ambassador to Belgium you might recall thanks to President Bush's recess appointment) gave $50,000 to the Swift Boat Liars in 2004 and has since claimed that he didn't know what they were doing. Hah. Anyway.

Mitt Romney has no such excuse.

Mitt Romney knows that John O'Neill never served a single day in Vietnam with John Kerry. Mitt Romney knows that Swifties like O'Neill got big checks from the Swift Boat veterans. Mitt Romney should give Sam Fox his money back.

Because if Fox got an ambassadorship for $50,000, what did Romney promise for $100,000?

Here is Romney's campaign contact info.

Give the blood money back Mitt!

A quick visit to John Edwards's Presidential Campaign web site clearly shows what his passions are and what he wants to talk about. Not necessarily in order of his priority, but John Edwards wants to:

End the war in Iraq.

Guarantee affordable health care to every American.

Fight global warming.

Eliminate poverty in America.

Revitalize rural America.

Restore America's moral authority in the world.

Help solve the humanitarian crisis in Africa.

It's almost too many critical issues and is more than enough to talk about right?

Well, this past week, we have seen clearly, that the Right Wing doesn't want to talk about these issues. Let's break them down briefly:

Will America be safer with a Republican president?

This has been the big "elephant in the room" question: the Republican branding of "strong on defense." Did any of the candidates knock this down?

Senator Clinton Senatorially said it is a "disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality" and then dived into policy details. "We haven't secured our borders, our ports, our mass transit systems ... resources haven't gotten to the front lines where decisions are made in local government..."

Senator Dodd also filibustered with boring policy details. "our first responders are not getting the support they deserve. The administration has been resistant in supporting them ... , not building the kind of international support -- stateless terrorism is a multinational problem ... requires a multinational response ... institutions we need to build to effectively engage and fight back against terrorism ... need to have leadership that knows how to build those relationships, to encourage that kind of participation..."

The other candidates didn't get a chance to respond, and politely did not.

But this is the question. This is, to many, the only question. Why didn't these candidates knock it out of the park?

We would not have been so polite. We would have made Mike Gravel look tame and shy -- shouting and waving our arms. We would have said:

"This is a lie. This is a marketing fraud perpetuated by the Right Wing against the American people. This is a well funded marketing program that is determined to mislead the American people and give them the Right Wing the power to send our sons and daughters to their deaths. It is just false.

The facts are clear. The Republicans market the myth. The Democrats deal in the reality of serving their country on the battlefield when they're young and keeping this country safer when they serve in Washington."

If it kind of worked once, keep trying it again and again. So once again, the Right is reviving the tired 90s Asian-donations smear on the Clintons.

Headlined at the Drudge Report, the Wall Street Journal has Big Source of Clinton's Cash Is an Unlikely Address,

It isn't obvious how the Paw family is able to afford such political largess. ...

But he added: "I have been fortunate in my investments and all of my contributions have been my money."

The Paws' political donations closely track donations made by Norman Hsu, a wealthy New York businessman in the apparel industry who once listed the Paw home as his address, according to public records. Mr. Hsu is one of the top fund-raisers for Mrs. Clinton's presidential campaign.

On January 22, 2007, as Senator Clinton went viral with her announcement that she was, essentially, running for The White House, we noted that her first challenge was to shatter the prism of the right. We wrote,

[T]his simply is a fact of modern politics in America. For the past three decades, the right wing has employed a powerful strategy of "$ell and $mear." They insist on being the gatekeepers to public opinion and have developed a powerful machine that tells us who to like - and who to hate.

... They $mear Democratic and Progressive heroes, reducing American success stories such as George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis into humiliated historical footnotes. They destroy our leaders. They destroy those that might become our leaders. There is no Democratic or Progressive leader of any note of the last twenty years that has not been attacked.