The Washington Post continues its long-running series “Defending the Agent of Change against Scurrilous Attacks by Ignorant Right Wingers.” The latest installment, by Eli Saslow, suggests that voters in Findlay, Ohio–a city the House of Representatives has officially designated as Flag City USA–just don’t know what to believe about Barack Obama. Take Jim Peterman,

a retired worker at Cooper Tire, a father of two, an Air Force veteran and a self-described patriot

Peterman wants to vote for a candidate who will bring the troops home, but

[f]irst, he must pick the version of Obama on which he will stake his vote. Does he choose to trust a TV commercial in which Obama talks about his “love of country”? Or his neighbor of 40 years, Don LeMaster, a Navy veteran who heard from a friend in Toledo that Obama refuses to wear an American-flag pin?

I wonder where anyone would get the crazy idea Obama refused to wear a flag pin. And of course Peterman keeps hearing about Obama being a radical Muslim.

“I’ll admit that I probably don’t follow all of the election news like maybe I should,” Peterman said. “I haven’t read his books or studied up more than a little bit. But it’s hard to ignore what you hear when everybody you know is saying it. These are good people, smart people, so can they really all be wrong?”

Well, you get the gist. These yahoos in Flag City USA are being duped into believing all the lies being perpetrated by the vast right-wing conspiracy and, once again, they’ll probably vote on the basis of prejudice instead of voting their economic self-interest. According to Saslow, they don’t much like “change” in Findlay, at least when it comes to color,

What was the story behind the handful of African Americans who had moved into a town that is 93 percent white? Why were Japanese businessmen coming in to run the local manufacturing plants? Who in the world was this Obama character, running for president with that funny-sounding last name?

I wonder how long this new WaPo series will run–from now to the Election Day, probably.