We've long been fans of the site The Smoking Gun, with its troves of mug shots, celebrity riders and other documents of the famous and infamous behaving badly. So it might seem a bit strange for us to accuse these purveyors of sensationalism of being, well, sensationalistic, but that's what we're going to do. A few minutes ago, while scanning the list of stories on The Drudge Report, we came across the following headline "Online shooting game lets kids target presidential candidates..." Intrigued, we clicked on the link, which brought us to The Smoking Gun and the headline "Hey Kids, Shoot Your Favorite Candidate!
Clinton, Obama pace gunners in "Presidential Paintball" online game." The site went on to describe the game as follows:

For the aspiring young assassin, a popular online games site offers kids the opportunity to assume the identity of a leading presidential contender and then shoot their political opponents in a series of armed confrontations in the White House. While the ammo is paintball, the game on the hugely popular miniclip.com site allows kids to train a rifle scope on six presidential aspirants and squeeze off a hail of shots (which are accompanied with a rat-a-tat sound). The game, "Presidential Paintball," features six candidates in the crosshairs: Barack Obama; Hillary Clinton; John Edwards; Mitt Romney; John McCain; and Rudy Giuliani (it seems the game was developed before the ascension of Mike Huckabee). If a candidate wins a head-to-head confrontation, he/she advances to a new shootout, which occurs in various White House settings, including outside the Oval Office. When a candidate gets blown away, bloodlessly, a screen appears noting that they have been "eliminated," not killed. To better direct a fusillade, young gunmen can use their computer's mouse to place a crosshairs on a candidate's head or body. Of course, the imagery of Obama and Clinton, both of whom have been the target of threats and receive Secret Service protection, being targeted in such a manner-by children, no less-might be seen as troubling in some quarters.

Sounds disgusting, doesn't it? Well, we clicked on the link for Presidential Paintball, selected Barack Obama--the candidate and the Level Up staff are both fans of Omar Little on "The Wire," so perhaps our mutual gangsta might give us an edge--and fired up the game. For the record, we got past Clinton, Edwards and Giuliani, but we were no match for the perfectly coiffed Romney. And far from the demonic blend of Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins" and Traffic Games' JFK: Reloaded, what we found was a cartoonish knockoff of any number of Flash-based 2-D shooters that was more silly than troubling--and would hardly be likely to inspire any "aspiring young assassins."