I have a baby duty to attend to for part of the morning, so posting will be light for a little bit. But I want to share an intriguing thought I heard from a Republican strategist.

In 2004, the Swift Boat Vets for Truth emerged as a complicating factor for the Democratic nominee, an issue that the Kerry campaign preferred to ignore as long as possible, and that much of the mainstream press deemed a completely irrelevant, completely irresponsible, baseless smear unworthy of a minute’s attention from any decent human being.

The American people disagreed. (Take a walk down memory lane from the Kerry Spot here, here and here and Byron here.) At the very least, they concluded that the “Christmas in Cambodia” story suggested that Kerry had a conveniently erring memory here and there, and that a significant number of Vietnam veterans and his former colleagues saw his (erroneous, or at least unverified) anti-war testimony as a betrayal. It probably didn’t decide the race by itself, but it changed the way Americans saw the Democratic nominee.

Anyway, this strategist wonders if the organization who will be playing the role of the Swift Boat Vets for Truth this year is… Hamas.

To many Americans, it’s really odd for a terrorist organization to say they want to see a particular candidate elected. It’s really, really odd to see a candidate’s advisor secretly meeting with a terrorist organization.

It’s Onion-parody level odd to see Palestinians in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip organizing phone banks on behalf of Obama.

(UPDATE: Forgot to add, when the campaign manager of the candidate says he’s “flattered” by the Hamas spokesman’s comparison of the candidate to John Kennedy, we’re now beyond anything the writers at The Onion could come up with.)

Perhaps all of this is because Barack Obama, alone among recent American presidential candidates, pledged at the YouTube debate to hold face-to-face summits with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

AFP caption: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president (L) pledges funds to Khaled Meshaal, the leader of Hamas.

(Once again, we observe that Obama contends a face-to-face summit with the guy on the left is long overdue; a face-to-face summit with the guy on the right is crazy talk.)

If you think of Hamas as bad guys — and clearly, a vocal minority in American politics don’t see them as irredeemably evil, merely misguided reactors to Israeli aggression — then you’re left wondering why the bad guys, whose loathing of the current president is clear (and a point of pride), are so eager to see President Obama.

The press does not like this question, does not like this issue, cannot understand why anyone would care, and will do everything they can to declare it an illegitimate issue.

The American people may disagree.