I’ve said that it is easier to discredit a large number of lingering questions about Obama by sprinking in a few obvious misattributed quotes and details.
The media doesn’t offer a point by point rebuttal, just pick out the strawmen arguments to disavow the emails in total.
Funny how that works. Almost as if it is by design.
You can see the same thing in some of the “rumors” about corporate support of liberalism or some scandal involving the Clintons that is “debunked” on Snopes by the libs who run that site.
Someone somewhere along the line takes several details and “enhances” them when the basic facts in some of these emails that are forwarded around have verifiable truth.
Is it a game of “telephone” where someone tells someone something and accidently miscommunicates part of it? Or is there an underlying reason for the alterations?
It seems odd for the media to focus on this candidate alone. Who started the rumors that McCain was inelligible for the Presidency? Who started the rumor about Bush’s cocaine use? Why isn’t the rumor of Obama’s cocaine use fair game this election?
Jan Brunvand has studied urban rumors (typically friend-of-a-friend tales) for something on the order of 40 years. It is his research (and books) that provide the basis for a number of Snopes’ apolitical rumors. And it is clear that some editors repeatedly would publish urban legends as news items long after they’d been debunked. It almost seems as if some editors would slip one in now and then because they were often funny or at least ironic and generally a bit of “harmless” filler.
Some tonight show guests have also been fed such stories to tell on the air as though they personally happened to them (long after the stories had circulated for decades as happening to “ordinary” people).
So to wrap this up Brunvand and other researchers generally tried to follow the variations and mutations of urban lore but seldom ever actually uncovered who generated the myth and who made alterations.
I guess in the age of the internet with time stamps and URL information it could be deduced given enough monkeys with keyboards banging away.
Just a minor quibble. It was a self-admission.