“I would never say President Obama doesn’t have the capacity to continue to serve because of his (statement) that there are 56 states,” Walpin said, adding that the same holds for Vice President Biden and his “many express confusions that have been highlighted by the media.” Obama mistakenly said once on the campaign trail that he had traveled to 57 states.

The “57 states” flub — thirteen months ago Obama apparently meant to say he’d been to 47 states, but said “57″ — is famous on the Fox News circuit and the conservative blogosphere, if pretty much forgotten everywhere else.

Now, a skeptic of the administration is not a bad guy to have investigating contracts. But Walpin had been attacked in 2008 as a “right-wing Republican” who said at a 2005 fundraiser for former Gov. Mitt Romney that Massachusetts was run by a “modern-day KKK” of the “Kennedy-Kerry Klan.” He gave one of his first interviews about this story to WorldNetDaily, the fringe site that’s hounding billboard companies that refuse to sell space to run ads about Barack Obama’s citizenship. None of this discredits Walpin, but it’s making him a less sympathetic figure at the very time that some Republicans, such as Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), are wondering if they can make a scandal out of this.

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In 1993, just after Bill Clinton was elected and Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, a lone Republican congressman, Rep. Bill Clinger, wanted to investigate the suspicious firings of the White House Travel Office staff. But majority Democrats had no inclination to pursue the matter. Clinger tried and tried, wrote letter after letter, and jumped up and down, but he didn’t begin to get results until after November 1994, when Republicans took control of both Houses of Congress.

The Travel Office? Really? To call “Travelgate” a phony scandal is to bring discredit to the concept of “phoniness.” After a seven-year investigation (nearly seven years after five of the fired employees got new federal jobs) all the inspectors discovered about the Travel Office firings was that then-First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton made some false statements about how it began. The Americorps story, like that story, might take on momentum, but “Travelgate” is typically and correctly remembered as an example of how politicized scandals can be spun out of nothing. If the Obama administration didn’t realize this before, it really should now.

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Yesterday, news broke that the Sacramento County Republican Party website was encouraging readers to “waterboard Barack Obama” and comparing him to Osama bin Laden.

Today, we move from inappropriate to racist.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise reports that a California Inland Republican women’s group circulated a newsletter with an image of a food stamp featuring Sen. Barack Obama’s head on a donkey’s body and surrounded by fried chicken, watermelon and ribs. See the P-E site for the incriminating image.

Incredibly, group president Diane Fedele denied any racist intent. “It was just food to me,” she claimed. “It didn’t mean anything else.”

Sure. And yelling “kill him” at a rally doesn’t constitute a threat.

On another front, here’s more evidence that solid-blue California isn’t as reliably liberal as we might think.

UPDATE: Since my post yesterday, the Sacramento GOP took down the rather insulting anti-Obama cartoons from its website. Here’s to progress!

Admittedly, among the many vile and incendiary charges leveled against Obama, this latter one was at least moderately clever. But California GOP leaders, among them Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, recognized that an attack of this sort have no place on a party website and urged county party chairman Craig MacGlashan to take it down.

You can take a look at a screenshot of the since-removed material, including two invocations of Obama’s wife, Michelle, on the Sacramento Bee website.

And you can see what it looks like for a civilian to get waterboarded here:

If you’re still feeling a little masochistic after watching that, take a look at the anti-Obama political cartoons, more vitriolic than funny, that now dominate the Sacramento GOP site.