On November 27 at 4:39 p.m. ET, Politico.com posted what it labeled an “update” at the end of an article by Politico contributor Michael M. Rosen posted earlier that day, which discussed how conservative writers “Andrew Sullivan, in the Atlantic Monthly, and Peggy Noonan, in The Wall Street Journal, have offered praise -- more qualified in one piece than in the other -- for” Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) presidential campaign. The update read: “The article was edited on Nov. 28 to clarify writer Andrew Sullivan's description of Sen. Barack Obama's educational background.” But the Politico.com update gave no indication what Rosen's article originally included about “Obama's educational background” or why it needed to be “clarif[ied].” Indeed, the “update[d]” version of the article includes no reference to Obama's pre-university education.

While the Politico.com update did not specify which statements in the original article had been edited, both a Daily Kos diary and comments to Rosen's article indicate that the article originally asserted that “Obama spent part of his youth studying in an Indonesian madrassa.” This reported assertion echoes a smear made by InsightMag.com that Obama “spent at least four years in a so-called Madrassa or Muslim seminary,” which was later debunked by CNN and others, as Media Matters for America noted. Moreover, contrary to Politico.com's assertion that the update was needed to “clarify writer Andrew Sullivan's description” of Obama's education, the claim in Rosen's article -- as reported by Daily Kos and in comments at Politico.com -- that Obama studied in a madrassa was Rosen's, not Sullivan's. Sullivan does not claim in his article in the December 2007 edition of Atlantic Monthly that Obama attended a madrassa, rather stating only that Obama “grew up in Indonesia” where he “attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy.”

Further, while Politico.com simply identified Rosen as a “Politico contributor” and “an attorney in San Diego,” Rosen is also the secretary of the San Diego Republican Party and the co-chairman of the San Diego chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

The Daily Kos diary by turneresq reported the following excerpt from the original version of Rosen's article:

In the second category falls arguments like the following, printed in a follow-up interview on TheAtlantic.com: “I also think that Obama's life story ... is a conservative story in a way: a black man who got to be the first African-American to chair the Harvard Law Review.”

There may indeed be slivers of conservatism in Obama's personal odyssey, but heading the Harvard Law Review sure isn't one of them.

More fatuously, Sullivan writes that the face and name of Barack Hussein Obama is arguably the “crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology.”

That Obama spent part of his youth studying in an Indonesian madrassa is merely disconcerting to Americans.

But it's downright lethal to Islamists, who consider him an apostate worthy of summary execution because he eschewed Islam in favor of Christianity.

While the Politico.com “update” indicates that the “article was edited on Nov. 28 to clarify writer Andrew Sullivan's description of Sen. Barack Obama's educational background,” there is no clarification offered. The last three paragraphs of the Daily Kos excerpt, in which Rosen reportedly referred to a “madrassa,” have apparently been deleted, along with any reference to Obama's pre-university education.