We all know someone whose uncle’s cousin’s wife’s brother-in-law forwarded them an email that conclusively PROVED that Obama is a Muslim (photos wearing turban! In Somalia-wherever on God’s earth that may be!!1!) , or a Jew (photos wearing yarmulke! At the Wailing Wall!!1!), has black children, is the right-hand man of Bin Laden, leading to (but hardly ending with) the much discussed New Yorker cover that Ruchira referred to in her recent post ‘Satire, Slander or no big deal‘ .
The latest is this is that Obama ‘blew off’ meeting with troops in Afghanistan to get to a basketball photo-op with the troops. Snopes.com, the motherlode of all internet rumor debunking, has gotten a flurry of responses regarding this and posted the details within barely 24 hours of the circulation of the smear, just as they had done regarding an email that mentioned Obama’s words taken from his book distorted or out of context.
It’s good to see the action-reaction pairs in the war on smears in action, that too all within a short time frame. If it continues at this pace, somebody is going to come up with an Obama-smear-widget and Obama-rebuttal-widget, just to make things easier for the campaign and its detractors.
Accidental Blogger 