J
Joe S.
Guest
QUOTE
The New Right-Wing Smear Machine
by CHRISTOPHER HAYES
[from the November 12, 2007 issue]
On February 27, 2001, two members of the American Gold Star Mothers, an
organization of women who've lost sons or daughters in combat, dropped by
the temporary basement offices of the new junior senator from New York,
Hillary Clinton. They didn't have an appointment, and the office, which had
been up and running for barely a month, was a bit discombobulated. The two
women wanted to talk to the senator about a bill pending in the Senate that
would provide annuities for the parents of those killed, but they were told
that Clinton wasn't in the office and that the relevant staff members were
otherwise engaged. The organization later submitted a formal request in
writing for a meeting, which Clinton granted, meeting and posing for
pictures with four members of the group.
But the story doesn't end there. In May of that year, the right-wing website
NewsMax, a clearinghouse for innuendo and rumor, ran a short item with the
headline "Hillary Snubs Gold Star Mothers." Reporting via hearsay--a comment
relayed to someone who then recounted it to the column's author--the article
claimed that Clinton and her staff "simply refused" to meet with the Gold
Star Mothers, making hers the "only office" in the Senate that snubbed the
group.
At first the item didn't attract much attention, but it quickly morphed into
an e-mail that started ricocheting across the Internet. "Bet this never hits
the TV news!" began one version. "According to NewsMax.com there was only
one politician in DC who refused to meet with these ladies. Can you guess
which politician that might be?... None other than the Queen herself--the
Hildebeast, Hillary Clinton."
Before long, the Gold Star Mothers and the Clinton office found themselves
inundated by inquiries about the "snub," prompting the Gold Star Mothers to
post a small item debunking the claim on their website. When that didn't
stem the tide, they posted a lengthier notice. "These allegations were not
initiated by the Gold Star Mothers.... This is a fabricated report picked up
by an individual using the Gold Star Mothers as an instrument to discredit
Senator Clinton.... We do not need mischeivous gossip and unfounded lies to
promote our organization. Please help stop it now."
That plea notwithstanding, the e-mail continues to circulate to this day.
Anyone who's been following politics for the past fifteen years won't be
surprised to find Hillary Clinton the subject of a false and damning
right-wing smear. We've all become familiar with the ways the Republican
noise machine transmits lurid bits of misinformation and tendentious attacks
from the conservative fringe into the heart of American political discourse,
the process by which a slightly misdelivered joke by John Kerry attracts the
ire of Rush Limbaugh and ends up on the front page of the New York Times.
But in some senses, the kind of under-the-radar attack embodied in the Gold
Star e-mail--which never made the jump to Fox or Drudge--is even harder to
deal with. "It's a Pandora's box," says Jim Kennedy, who served as Clinton's
communications director during her first Senate term. "Once [the charges]
are out in the ether, they are very hard to combat. It's very unlike a
traditional media, newspaper or TV show, or even a blog, which at least has
a fixed point of reference. You know they're traveling far and wide, but
there's no way to rebut them with all the people that have seen them."
Such is the power of the right-wing smear forward, a vehicle for the
dissemination of character assassination that has escaped the scrutiny
directed at the Limbaughs and Coulters and O'Reillys but one that is as
potent as it is invisible. In 2004 putative firsthand accounts of Kerry's
performance in Vietnam traveled through e-mail in right-wing circles,
presaging the Swift Boat attacks. Last winter a forward began circulating
accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim schooled in a radical
madrassa (about which more later). While the story was later fed through
familiar right-wing megaphones, even making it onto Fox, it has continued to
circulate via e-mail long after being definitively debunked by CNN. In other
words, the few weeks the smear spent in the glare of the mainstream media
was just a tiny portion of a long life cycle, most of which has been spent
darting from inbox to inbox.
In that respect, the e-mail forward doesn't fit into our existing model of
the right-wing noise machine's structure (hierarchical) or its approach
(broadcast). It is, instead, organic and peer-to-peer. If the manufactured
outrage over Kerry's botched joke about George Bush's study habits was the
equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, the Gold Star Mother smear was like
one of those goofy viral videos of a dog on a skateboard on YouTube. Of
course, some of those videos end up with 25 million page views. And now that
large media companies understand their potential, they've begun trying to
create their own. Which prompts the obvious question: if a handful of
millionaires and disgruntled Swift Boat Veterans were able to sabotage
Kerry's campaign in 2004, what kind of havoc could be wreaked in 2008 by a
few political operatives armed with little more than Outlook and a talent
for gossip?
The smear forward has its roots in two distinct forms of Internet-age
communication. First, there's the electronically disseminated urban legend
("Help find this missing child!"; "Bill Gates is going to pay people for
every e-mail they send!"), which has been a staple of the Internet since the
mid- '90s. Then there's the surreal genre of right-wing e-mail forwards.
These range from creepy rage-filled quasi-fascist invocations ("The next
time you see an adult talking...during the playing of the National
Anthem--kick their ass") to treacly aphorisms of patriotic/religious uplift
("remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus
Christ...and the American Soldier").
For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk-radio,
are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the
mainstream media ignore. "I get a million of them!" says Gerald DeSimone, a
74-year-old veteran from Ridgewood, New Jersey, who describes his politics
as "to the right of Attila the Hun." "If I forwarded every one on, everyone
would hate me.... I'm trying to cut back. I try to send no more than two or
three a day. I must get thirty or forty a day."
Mike D'Asto, a 29-year-old assistant cameraman living in New York, received
so many forwards from his conservative father he started a blog called
MyRightWingDad.net, where he shares them with other unwitting recipients. "I
suddenly have connected to all these people who receive these right-wing
forwards from their brothers-in-law," D'Asto told me. "Surprisingly, a very
large number of people receive these."
And that, of course, is the problem.
Rumormongering and whisper campaigns are as old as politics itself
(throughout Thomas Jefferson's presidency opposition newspapers and
pamphlets spread the word of his affair with Sally Hemings), but never has
there been a medium as perfectly suited to the widespread anonymous
diffusion of misinformation as e-mail. David Mikkelson, who, along with his
wife, Barbara, founded and runs the website Snopes.com, knows this better
than anyone. Devoted exclusively to debunking (and occasionally confirming)
urban legends and e-mail-circulated apocrypha, Snopes attracts 4-5 million
unique visitors a month, making it one of the Internet's most popular sites.
In the early days, Mikkelson says, there were hardly any political urban
legends, but that changed in 2000. "A lot of the things that were
circulating in the world at large, things like ridiculing Al Gore for
supposedly inventing the Internet," started to be passed along via e-mail,
as well as "a photograph of Gore holding a gun intended to mock him for not
holding it safely."
From the beginning, the vast majority of these Internet-disseminated rumors
have come from the right. (Snopes lists about fifty e-mails about George W.
Bush, split evenly between adulatory accounts of him saluting wounded
soldiers or witnessing to a wayward teenager, and accounts of real and
invented malapropisms. In contrast, every single one of the twenty-two
e-mails about John Kerry is negative.) For conservatives, these e-mails
neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with
their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities
are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The
stories of the former's perfidy and the latter's heroism are, of course,
never told by the liberal media. So it's left to the conservative
underground to get the truth out. And since the general story and the roles
stay the same, often the actual characters are interchangeable.
"A lot of the chain letters that were accusing Al Gore of things in 2000
were recycled in 2004 and changed to Kerry," says John Ratliff, who runs a
site called BreakTheChain.org, which, like Snopes, devotes itself to
debunking chain e-mails. One e-mail falsely described a Senate committee
hearing in the 1980s where Oliver North offered an impassioned
Cassandra-like warning about the threat of Osama bin Laden, only to be
dismissed by a condescending Democratic senator. Originally it was Al Gore
who played the role of the senator, but by 2004 it had changed to John
Kerry. "You just plug in your political front-runner du jour," Ratliff says.
Even if many of the tropes were consistent, the tenor of the e-mails grew
more aggressive between 2000 and 2004. "It got really nasty," says Ratliff.
"You started seeing things reported as real news that, if you looked into
it, you realized was opinion or supposition or someone trying to discredit
another candidate through character assassination. You saw a lot of chain
letters that purported to be from members of the Swift Boat group or
firsthand accounts of people who supposedly had experience with Kerry in
Vietnam. A lot of them didn't check out."
Aside from specious allegations about his military service, many of the
e-mails attacking Kerry either emphasized his wealth (photos of each of his
five residences) or relayed putative firsthand accounts of the senator
acting like an imperious *****. Hal Cranmer, a former Air Force pilot, wrote
a widely circulated account of his experience flying Kerry around Vietnam
and Cambodia in 1991 in which Kerry scarfs pizza meant for the crew, forces
the pilots to sit for an hour in an un-air-conditioned plane and boasts that
he "never sail on anything less than 135 feet." (Since it's a matter of
historical record that Kerry has sailed boats smaller than 135 feet, this
quote seems highly dubious.)
When I tracked down Cranmer during his lunch break at the aerospace
manufacturing firm he works for in Minnesota, I was surprised to hear him
ruefully recall his brush with Internet fame. "It gave me a real lesson. My
wife says one of the reasons she married me is that I don't talk badly about
people," he said with a laugh. "I really didn't mean to do that here."
In spring 2004, as John Kerry began to emerge as the probable nominee,
Cranmer e-mailed his account to the libertarian website LewRockwell.com,
where readers were sharing their personal experiences about meeting Kerry.
"I said, OK, I'll put in my two cents.... I thought maybe I'd get one or two
e-mails about it and it would just disappear." That was not to be. "All of a
sudden I was getting fifty e-mails a day. I had an annual meeting with the
Air Force pilots, and a friend said, 'Tell your story about John Kerry,' and
everyone in the room was going, 'I got that e-mail! That was you?' I had
neighbors walking in and saying, 'Hey, I got an e-mail about you.' I was
trying to keep this low-key, not try to ruin an election here. I was just
relating an experience that happened to me. People drew all kinds of crazy
conclusions from it other than I had a bad experience with him." Added
Cranmer, "Maybe he's the nicest guy in the world, and he was in a bad mood
going into Vietnam.... I really didn't mean this to be as huge as it was."
Cranmer told me he was a libertarian and a big fan of Ron Paul. "I voted for
Bush in 2000 and have regretted it ever since. I didn't even vote in 2004."
He now wishes he'd kept his impressions to himself. Some anecdote of casual
thoughtlessness "shouldn't be what defines the presidency."
But of course, that's exactly the kind of thing that did define the last
presidential election. Cranmer's e-mail, and those of a similar ilk, were
perfectly in line with the broader narrative of the Bush campaign, in which
the major knock on Kerry was that he was an elitist, disingenuous jerk--a
"bad man," in Lynne Cheney's phrasing. Like the other popular e-mails that
circulated in 2004, Cranmer's includes not a single substantive criticism of
Kerry's platform or policy preferences, but the unflattering picture it
offers has an effect that's immediate and visceral. It lingers in the back
of one's head.
It was similar gossip that helped spell doom for John McCain during the
South Carolina primary in 2000, when a whisper campaign spread rumors that
he had a black daughter out of wedlock. "John McCain was done in by leaflets
put on cars in church parking lots," says Democratic campaign consultant
Chris Lehane. Forwarded e-mails, he says, "are the digital version of this
and potentially more pernicious and far-reaching because of the obvious
efficiencies of the online world. I would fully expect to see it manifesting
in the GOP primary." Sure enough, a few weeks after I spoke to Lehane, Mike
Huckabee's Iowa state campaign chair, Bob Vander Plaats, issued a statement
denying that he'd written an e-mail that voters had received bearing his
name. In that hoax e-mail, someone impersonating Vander Plaats announced
that he was dropping Huckabee because of low fundraising numbers and backing
Mitt Romney instead and urging others to do the same.
Faced with dubious attacks, circulating below the radar, campaigns find
themselves in a familiar bind, one that handcuffed Kerry in 2004 when the
Swift Boat charges first cropped up in ads, talk-radio and e-mail. If you
respond, you run the risk of bringing the original false accusation to a
wider audience. This is particularly true when the e-mails don't even have a
putative author attached. "For lots of these e-mails, there's never any
definable source," says Mikkelson. "They just seem to come out of nowhere."
That leads to the $64,000 question: are these anonymous attacks organic
emanations of the diffuse political consciousness, or are they deliberately
seeded by professional political operators? Mikkelson is skeptical that
anyone could intentionally write the kind of e-mail that would take off
virally. "Even people who are steeped in it, it's very, very difficult to
start something deliberately that will catch on." Still, there's some
evidence it's been done. Snopes determined that a gushing pro-Bush e-mail
from 2004 about watching the President worship in the pews of St. John's
Church in Washington was actually written by the press spokeswoman for
Republican Senator Lamar Alexander. Her name is Laura Lefler, and she now
works for Senator Bob Corker. I tried to contact Lefler to get a sense of
what inspired her to write the e-mail and how, exactly, she disseminated it,
but she wouldn't return my calls or e-mails.
The most notorious smear forward of this cycle is the Obama/madrassa canard,
which represents the cutting edge of electronic rumor. At least two weeks
before the Obama/madrassa smear appeared in the online magazine Insight, on
January 17, it had been circulating widely in an e-mail forward that laid
out the basics of Obama's bio in a flat, reportorial tone before concluding
thus:
Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim.... Lolo
Soetoro, the second husband of Obama's mother...introduced his stepson to
Islam. Osama was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the
radical teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now
waging Jihad against the western world. Since it is politically expedient to
be a Christian when seeking major public office in the United States, Barack
Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to
downplay his Muslim background.
Let us all remain alert concerning Obama's expected presidential candidacy.
Did you catch that typo in the crucial sentence? And the strategic
deployment of Obama's middle name? It's a coldly effective bit of slander: a
single damning lie (the school Obama attended was a run-of-the mill public
elementary school) snuggled tightly within a litany of mundane facts,
followed by dark insinuation.
Who wrote it? The unsatisfying answer is, we'll probably never know. "The
thing to keep in mind about e-mail is that there is absolutely zero built-in
security or data integrity," my friend Paul Smith, a software developer with
EveryBlock.com, explained to me when I asked him if there was any way I
could trace the Obama e-mail to its original author. "That's why there is
spam. I could construct an e-mail from scratch and deliver it and have it
seem like it was coming from Steve Jobs, and for all intents and purposes
the receiver would have no way of knowing it wasn't from Cupertino."
But even if the identity of the e-mail's author was unrecoverable, it was
still possible to trace back the roots of its content. The origin proved
even more bizarre than I could have guessed.
On August 10, 2004, just two weeks after Obama had given his much-heralded
keynote speech at the DNC in Boston, a perennial Republican Senate candidate
and self-described "independent contrarian columnist" named Andy Martin
issued a press release. In it, he announced a press conference in which he
would expose Obama for having "lied to the American people" and
"misrepresent[ed] his own heritage."
Martin raised all kinds of strange allegations about Obama but focused on
him attempting to hide his Muslim past. "It may well be that his concealment
is meant to endanger Israel," read Martin's statement. "His Muslim religion
would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles where Obama
now enjoys support."
A quick word about Andy Martin. During a 1983 bankruptcy case he referred to
a federal judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and
thieving common to members of his race." Martin, who in the past was known
as Anthony Martin-Trigona, is one of the most notorious litigants in the
history of the United States. He's filed hundreds, possibly thousands, of
lawsuits, often directed at judges who have ruled against him, or media
outlets that cover him unfavorably. A 1993 opinion by the US Court of
Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in Atlanta, described these lawsuits as "a
cruel and effective weapon against his enemies," and called Martin a
"notoriously vexatious and vindictive litigator who has long abused the
American legal system." He once even attempted to intervene in the divorce
proceedings of a judge who'd ruled against him, petitioning the state court
to be appointed as the guardian of the judge's children.
When I asked Martin for the source of his allegations about Obama's past, he
told me they came from "people in London, among other places." Why London, I
asked? "I started talking to them about Kenyan law. Every little morsel led
me a little farther along."
Within a few days of Martin's press conference, the conservative site Free
Republic had picked it up, attracting a long comment thread, but after that
small blip the specious "questions" about Obama's background disappeared.
Then, in the fall of 2006, as word got out that Obama was considering a
presidential run, murmurs on the Internet resumed. In October a conservative
blog called Infidel Bloggers Alliance reposted the Andy Martin press release
under the title "Is Barack Obama Lying About His Life Story?" A few days
later the online RumorMillNews also reposted the Andy Martin press release
in response to a reader's inquiry about whether Obama was a Muslim. Then in
December fringe right-wing activist Ted Sampley posted a column on the web
raising the possibility that Obama was a secret Muslim. Sampley, who
co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry and once accused John McCain
of having been a KGB asset, quoted heavily from Martin's original press
release. "When Obama was six," Sampley wrote, "his mother, an atheist,
married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian Muslim, and moved to Jakarta,
Indonesia.... Soetoro enrolled his stepson in one of Jakarta's Muslim
Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim
terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the rest of the world."
On December 29, 2006, the very same day that Sampley posted his column,
Snopes received its first copy of the e-mail forward, which contains an
identical charge in strikingly similar language. Given the timing, it seems
likely that it was a distillation of Sampley's work.
Despite the fact that CNN and others have thoroughly debunked the smear, the
original false accusation has clearly sunk into people's consciousness. One
Obama organizer told me recently that every day, while calling prospective
voters, he gets at least one or two people who tell him they won't be voting
for Obama because he's a Muslim. According to Google, "Barack Obama Muslim"
is the third most-searched term for the Illinois senator. And an August CBS
poll found that when voters were asked to give Obama's religion, as many
said Muslim as correctly answered Protestant.
Oh yeah. And the e-mail continues to circulate.
"Everybody started calling me" when the e-mail first made the rounds, Andy
Martin told me. "They said, 'Hey, did you write this?' My answer was 'they
are all my children.' "
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071112/hayes
END QUOTE
The New Right-Wing Smear Machine
by CHRISTOPHER HAYES
[from the November 12, 2007 issue]
On February 27, 2001, two members of the American Gold Star Mothers, an
organization of women who've lost sons or daughters in combat, dropped by
the temporary basement offices of the new junior senator from New York,
Hillary Clinton. They didn't have an appointment, and the office, which had
been up and running for barely a month, was a bit discombobulated. The two
women wanted to talk to the senator about a bill pending in the Senate that
would provide annuities for the parents of those killed, but they were told
that Clinton wasn't in the office and that the relevant staff members were
otherwise engaged. The organization later submitted a formal request in
writing for a meeting, which Clinton granted, meeting and posing for
pictures with four members of the group.
But the story doesn't end there. In May of that year, the right-wing website
NewsMax, a clearinghouse for innuendo and rumor, ran a short item with the
headline "Hillary Snubs Gold Star Mothers." Reporting via hearsay--a comment
relayed to someone who then recounted it to the column's author--the article
claimed that Clinton and her staff "simply refused" to meet with the Gold
Star Mothers, making hers the "only office" in the Senate that snubbed the
group.
At first the item didn't attract much attention, but it quickly morphed into
an e-mail that started ricocheting across the Internet. "Bet this never hits
the TV news!" began one version. "According to NewsMax.com there was only
one politician in DC who refused to meet with these ladies. Can you guess
which politician that might be?... None other than the Queen herself--the
Hildebeast, Hillary Clinton."
Before long, the Gold Star Mothers and the Clinton office found themselves
inundated by inquiries about the "snub," prompting the Gold Star Mothers to
post a small item debunking the claim on their website. When that didn't
stem the tide, they posted a lengthier notice. "These allegations were not
initiated by the Gold Star Mothers.... This is a fabricated report picked up
by an individual using the Gold Star Mothers as an instrument to discredit
Senator Clinton.... We do not need mischeivous gossip and unfounded lies to
promote our organization. Please help stop it now."
That plea notwithstanding, the e-mail continues to circulate to this day.
Anyone who's been following politics for the past fifteen years won't be
surprised to find Hillary Clinton the subject of a false and damning
right-wing smear. We've all become familiar with the ways the Republican
noise machine transmits lurid bits of misinformation and tendentious attacks
from the conservative fringe into the heart of American political discourse,
the process by which a slightly misdelivered joke by John Kerry attracts the
ire of Rush Limbaugh and ends up on the front page of the New York Times.
But in some senses, the kind of under-the-radar attack embodied in the Gold
Star e-mail--which never made the jump to Fox or Drudge--is even harder to
deal with. "It's a Pandora's box," says Jim Kennedy, who served as Clinton's
communications director during her first Senate term. "Once [the charges]
are out in the ether, they are very hard to combat. It's very unlike a
traditional media, newspaper or TV show, or even a blog, which at least has
a fixed point of reference. You know they're traveling far and wide, but
there's no way to rebut them with all the people that have seen them."
Such is the power of the right-wing smear forward, a vehicle for the
dissemination of character assassination that has escaped the scrutiny
directed at the Limbaughs and Coulters and O'Reillys but one that is as
potent as it is invisible. In 2004 putative firsthand accounts of Kerry's
performance in Vietnam traveled through e-mail in right-wing circles,
presaging the Swift Boat attacks. Last winter a forward began circulating
accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim schooled in a radical
madrassa (about which more later). While the story was later fed through
familiar right-wing megaphones, even making it onto Fox, it has continued to
circulate via e-mail long after being definitively debunked by CNN. In other
words, the few weeks the smear spent in the glare of the mainstream media
was just a tiny portion of a long life cycle, most of which has been spent
darting from inbox to inbox.
In that respect, the e-mail forward doesn't fit into our existing model of
the right-wing noise machine's structure (hierarchical) or its approach
(broadcast). It is, instead, organic and peer-to-peer. If the manufactured
outrage over Kerry's botched joke about George Bush's study habits was the
equivalent of a Hollywood blockbuster, the Gold Star Mother smear was like
one of those goofy viral videos of a dog on a skateboard on YouTube. Of
course, some of those videos end up with 25 million page views. And now that
large media companies understand their potential, they've begun trying to
create their own. Which prompts the obvious question: if a handful of
millionaires and disgruntled Swift Boat Veterans were able to sabotage
Kerry's campaign in 2004, what kind of havoc could be wreaked in 2008 by a
few political operatives armed with little more than Outlook and a talent
for gossip?
The smear forward has its roots in two distinct forms of Internet-age
communication. First, there's the electronically disseminated urban legend
("Help find this missing child!"; "Bill Gates is going to pay people for
every e-mail they send!"), which has been a staple of the Internet since the
mid- '90s. Then there's the surreal genre of right-wing e-mail forwards.
These range from creepy rage-filled quasi-fascist invocations ("The next
time you see an adult talking...during the playing of the National
Anthem--kick their ass") to treacly aphorisms of patriotic/religious uplift
("remember only two defining forces have ever offered to die for you, Jesus
Christ...and the American Soldier").
For a certain kind of conservative, these e-mails, along with talk-radio,
are an informational staple, a means of getting the real stories that the
mainstream media ignore. "I get a million of them!" says Gerald DeSimone, a
74-year-old veteran from Ridgewood, New Jersey, who describes his politics
as "to the right of Attila the Hun." "If I forwarded every one on, everyone
would hate me.... I'm trying to cut back. I try to send no more than two or
three a day. I must get thirty or forty a day."
Mike D'Asto, a 29-year-old assistant cameraman living in New York, received
so many forwards from his conservative father he started a blog called
MyRightWingDad.net, where he shares them with other unwitting recipients. "I
suddenly have connected to all these people who receive these right-wing
forwards from their brothers-in-law," D'Asto told me. "Surprisingly, a very
large number of people receive these."
And that, of course, is the problem.
Rumormongering and whisper campaigns are as old as politics itself
(throughout Thomas Jefferson's presidency opposition newspapers and
pamphlets spread the word of his affair with Sally Hemings), but never has
there been a medium as perfectly suited to the widespread anonymous
diffusion of misinformation as e-mail. David Mikkelson, who, along with his
wife, Barbara, founded and runs the website Snopes.com, knows this better
than anyone. Devoted exclusively to debunking (and occasionally confirming)
urban legends and e-mail-circulated apocrypha, Snopes attracts 4-5 million
unique visitors a month, making it one of the Internet's most popular sites.
In the early days, Mikkelson says, there were hardly any political urban
legends, but that changed in 2000. "A lot of the things that were
circulating in the world at large, things like ridiculing Al Gore for
supposedly inventing the Internet," started to be passed along via e-mail,
as well as "a photograph of Gore holding a gun intended to mock him for not
holding it safely."
From the beginning, the vast majority of these Internet-disseminated rumors
have come from the right. (Snopes lists about fifty e-mails about George W.
Bush, split evenly between adulatory accounts of him saluting wounded
soldiers or witnessing to a wayward teenager, and accounts of real and
invented malapropisms. In contrast, every single one of the twenty-two
e-mails about John Kerry is negative.) For conservatives, these e-mails
neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with
their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities
are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The
stories of the former's perfidy and the latter's heroism are, of course,
never told by the liberal media. So it's left to the conservative
underground to get the truth out. And since the general story and the roles
stay the same, often the actual characters are interchangeable.
"A lot of the chain letters that were accusing Al Gore of things in 2000
were recycled in 2004 and changed to Kerry," says John Ratliff, who runs a
site called BreakTheChain.org, which, like Snopes, devotes itself to
debunking chain e-mails. One e-mail falsely described a Senate committee
hearing in the 1980s where Oliver North offered an impassioned
Cassandra-like warning about the threat of Osama bin Laden, only to be
dismissed by a condescending Democratic senator. Originally it was Al Gore
who played the role of the senator, but by 2004 it had changed to John
Kerry. "You just plug in your political front-runner du jour," Ratliff says.
Even if many of the tropes were consistent, the tenor of the e-mails grew
more aggressive between 2000 and 2004. "It got really nasty," says Ratliff.
"You started seeing things reported as real news that, if you looked into
it, you realized was opinion or supposition or someone trying to discredit
another candidate through character assassination. You saw a lot of chain
letters that purported to be from members of the Swift Boat group or
firsthand accounts of people who supposedly had experience with Kerry in
Vietnam. A lot of them didn't check out."
Aside from specious allegations about his military service, many of the
e-mails attacking Kerry either emphasized his wealth (photos of each of his
five residences) or relayed putative firsthand accounts of the senator
acting like an imperious *****. Hal Cranmer, a former Air Force pilot, wrote
a widely circulated account of his experience flying Kerry around Vietnam
and Cambodia in 1991 in which Kerry scarfs pizza meant for the crew, forces
the pilots to sit for an hour in an un-air-conditioned plane and boasts that
he "never sail
historical record that Kerry has sailed boats smaller than 135 feet, this
quote seems highly dubious.)
When I tracked down Cranmer during his lunch break at the aerospace
manufacturing firm he works for in Minnesota, I was surprised to hear him
ruefully recall his brush with Internet fame. "It gave me a real lesson. My
wife says one of the reasons she married me is that I don't talk badly about
people," he said with a laugh. "I really didn't mean to do that here."
In spring 2004, as John Kerry began to emerge as the probable nominee,
Cranmer e-mailed his account to the libertarian website LewRockwell.com,
where readers were sharing their personal experiences about meeting Kerry.
"I said, OK, I'll put in my two cents.... I thought maybe I'd get one or two
e-mails about it and it would just disappear." That was not to be. "All of a
sudden I was getting fifty e-mails a day. I had an annual meeting with the
Air Force pilots, and a friend said, 'Tell your story about John Kerry,' and
everyone in the room was going, 'I got that e-mail! That was you?' I had
neighbors walking in and saying, 'Hey, I got an e-mail about you.' I was
trying to keep this low-key, not try to ruin an election here. I was just
relating an experience that happened to me. People drew all kinds of crazy
conclusions from it other than I had a bad experience with him." Added
Cranmer, "Maybe he's the nicest guy in the world, and he was in a bad mood
going into Vietnam.... I really didn't mean this to be as huge as it was."
Cranmer told me he was a libertarian and a big fan of Ron Paul. "I voted for
Bush in 2000 and have regretted it ever since. I didn't even vote in 2004."
He now wishes he'd kept his impressions to himself. Some anecdote of casual
thoughtlessness "shouldn't be what defines the presidency."
But of course, that's exactly the kind of thing that did define the last
presidential election. Cranmer's e-mail, and those of a similar ilk, were
perfectly in line with the broader narrative of the Bush campaign, in which
the major knock on Kerry was that he was an elitist, disingenuous jerk--a
"bad man," in Lynne Cheney's phrasing. Like the other popular e-mails that
circulated in 2004, Cranmer's includes not a single substantive criticism of
Kerry's platform or policy preferences, but the unflattering picture it
offers has an effect that's immediate and visceral. It lingers in the back
of one's head.
It was similar gossip that helped spell doom for John McCain during the
South Carolina primary in 2000, when a whisper campaign spread rumors that
he had a black daughter out of wedlock. "John McCain was done in by leaflets
put on cars in church parking lots," says Democratic campaign consultant
Chris Lehane. Forwarded e-mails, he says, "are the digital version of this
and potentially more pernicious and far-reaching because of the obvious
efficiencies of the online world. I would fully expect to see it manifesting
in the GOP primary." Sure enough, a few weeks after I spoke to Lehane, Mike
Huckabee's Iowa state campaign chair, Bob Vander Plaats, issued a statement
denying that he'd written an e-mail that voters had received bearing his
name. In that hoax e-mail, someone impersonating Vander Plaats announced
that he was dropping Huckabee because of low fundraising numbers and backing
Mitt Romney instead and urging others to do the same.
Faced with dubious attacks, circulating below the radar, campaigns find
themselves in a familiar bind, one that handcuffed Kerry in 2004 when the
Swift Boat charges first cropped up in ads, talk-radio and e-mail. If you
respond, you run the risk of bringing the original false accusation to a
wider audience. This is particularly true when the e-mails don't even have a
putative author attached. "For lots of these e-mails, there's never any
definable source," says Mikkelson. "They just seem to come out of nowhere."
That leads to the $64,000 question: are these anonymous attacks organic
emanations of the diffuse political consciousness, or are they deliberately
seeded by professional political operators? Mikkelson is skeptical that
anyone could intentionally write the kind of e-mail that would take off
virally. "Even people who are steeped in it, it's very, very difficult to
start something deliberately that will catch on." Still, there's some
evidence it's been done. Snopes determined that a gushing pro-Bush e-mail
from 2004 about watching the President worship in the pews of St. John's
Church in Washington was actually written by the press spokeswoman for
Republican Senator Lamar Alexander. Her name is Laura Lefler, and she now
works for Senator Bob Corker. I tried to contact Lefler to get a sense of
what inspired her to write the e-mail and how, exactly, she disseminated it,
but she wouldn't return my calls or e-mails.
The most notorious smear forward of this cycle is the Obama/madrassa canard,
which represents the cutting edge of electronic rumor. At least two weeks
before the Obama/madrassa smear appeared in the online magazine Insight, on
January 17, it had been circulating widely in an e-mail forward that laid
out the basics of Obama's bio in a flat, reportorial tone before concluding
thus:
Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim.... Lolo
Soetoro, the second husband of Obama's mother...introduced his stepson to
Islam. Osama was enrolled in a Wahabi school in Jakarta. Wahabism is the
radical teaching that is followed by the Muslim terrorists who are now
waging Jihad against the western world. Since it is politically expedient to
be a Christian when seeking major public office in the United States, Barack
Hussein Obama has joined the United Church of Christ in an attempt to
downplay his Muslim background.
Let us all remain alert concerning Obama's expected presidential candidacy.
Did you catch that typo in the crucial sentence? And the strategic
deployment of Obama's middle name? It's a coldly effective bit of slander: a
single damning lie (the school Obama attended was a run-of-the mill public
elementary school) snuggled tightly within a litany of mundane facts,
followed by dark insinuation.
Who wrote it? The unsatisfying answer is, we'll probably never know. "The
thing to keep in mind about e-mail is that there is absolutely zero built-in
security or data integrity," my friend Paul Smith, a software developer with
EveryBlock.com, explained to me when I asked him if there was any way I
could trace the Obama e-mail to its original author. "That's why there is
spam. I could construct an e-mail from scratch and deliver it and have it
seem like it was coming from Steve Jobs, and for all intents and purposes
the receiver would have no way of knowing it wasn't from Cupertino."
But even if the identity of the e-mail's author was unrecoverable, it was
still possible to trace back the roots of its content. The origin proved
even more bizarre than I could have guessed.
On August 10, 2004, just two weeks after Obama had given his much-heralded
keynote speech at the DNC in Boston, a perennial Republican Senate candidate
and self-described "independent contrarian columnist" named Andy Martin
issued a press release. In it, he announced a press conference in which he
would expose Obama for having "lied to the American people" and
"misrepresent[ed] his own heritage."
Martin raised all kinds of strange allegations about Obama but focused on
him attempting to hide his Muslim past. "It may well be that his concealment
is meant to endanger Israel," read Martin's statement. "His Muslim religion
would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles where Obama
now enjoys support."
A quick word about Andy Martin. During a 1983 bankruptcy case he referred to
a federal judge as a "crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and
thieving common to members of his race." Martin, who in the past was known
as Anthony Martin-Trigona, is one of the most notorious litigants in the
history of the United States. He's filed hundreds, possibly thousands, of
lawsuits, often directed at judges who have ruled against him, or media
outlets that cover him unfavorably. A 1993 opinion by the US Court of
Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in Atlanta, described these lawsuits as "a
cruel and effective weapon against his enemies," and called Martin a
"notoriously vexatious and vindictive litigator who has long abused the
American legal system." He once even attempted to intervene in the divorce
proceedings of a judge who'd ruled against him, petitioning the state court
to be appointed as the guardian of the judge's children.
When I asked Martin for the source of his allegations about Obama's past, he
told me they came from "people in London, among other places." Why London, I
asked? "I started talking to them about Kenyan law. Every little morsel led
me a little farther along."
Within a few days of Martin's press conference, the conservative site Free
Republic had picked it up, attracting a long comment thread, but after that
small blip the specious "questions" about Obama's background disappeared.
Then, in the fall of 2006, as word got out that Obama was considering a
presidential run, murmurs on the Internet resumed. In October a conservative
blog called Infidel Bloggers Alliance reposted the Andy Martin press release
under the title "Is Barack Obama Lying About His Life Story?" A few days
later the online RumorMillNews also reposted the Andy Martin press release
in response to a reader's inquiry about whether Obama was a Muslim. Then in
December fringe right-wing activist Ted Sampley posted a column on the web
raising the possibility that Obama was a secret Muslim. Sampley, who
co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry and once accused John McCain
of having been a KGB asset, quoted heavily from Martin's original press
release. "When Obama was six," Sampley wrote, "his mother, an atheist,
married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian Muslim, and moved to Jakarta,
Indonesia.... Soetoro enrolled his stepson in one of Jakarta's Muslim
Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim
terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the rest of the world."
On December 29, 2006, the very same day that Sampley posted his column,
Snopes received its first copy of the e-mail forward, which contains an
identical charge in strikingly similar language. Given the timing, it seems
likely that it was a distillation of Sampley's work.
Despite the fact that CNN and others have thoroughly debunked the smear, the
original false accusation has clearly sunk into people's consciousness. One
Obama organizer told me recently that every day, while calling prospective
voters, he gets at least one or two people who tell him they won't be voting
for Obama because he's a Muslim. According to Google, "Barack Obama Muslim"
is the third most-searched term for the Illinois senator. And an August CBS
poll found that when voters were asked to give Obama's religion, as many
said Muslim as correctly answered Protestant.
Oh yeah. And the e-mail continues to circulate.
"Everybody started calling me" when the e-mail first made the rounds, Andy
Martin told me. "They said, 'Hey, did you write this?' My answer was 'they
are all my children.' "
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071112/hayes
END QUOTE
