We all receive ridiculous forwarded emails, the scourge of too-easy communication. Remember the $250 cookie recipe? Ah, a true classic.
Anyway, one sub-category is the political smear email. I’ve seen a few recent diaries on various forwarded emails on Obama. My wife got a nasty one this morning, maybe you’ve seen it, that lists various allegedly racist quotes from Obama’s writings. My wife forwarded the Snopes.com page back to the sender and everyone on the send-list; this is the proper response in this particular case, I believe. Needless to say, the quotes are generally taken out of proper context, altered to imply something not in the original, or not Obama’s words at all.
Then it occurred to us while discussing this problem...where are the McCain email-forward "smears"? I couldn’t remember seeing a single one.
Well, comparing the Snopes.com pages on McCain and Obama is quite interesting.
There's more...
McCain on Snopes
There are only four rumors listed. Three of these are positive stories about McCain (or his wife), and two of them are labeled "True"; one is labeled "undetermined" (and "research in progress"). The last one is not exactly critical of McCain, (it depends on your point of view), but is also true (a quote by him seeming to praise the Democratic Party).
So, four common rumors listed on Snopes, all of which are true (or undetermined), and all but one is meant to portray McCain in a positive light.
Obama on Snopes
Obama has twenty-two rumors listed on Snopes. Of these I consider 20 of them to be negative smears; two are just meant to be funny (I think). Of these twenty, fully twelve are unambiguously and completely false, five are listed as having "multiple truth values" and so are at least partly false, and two are "undetermined" (although one of these has been at least partially refuted). Only a single one is categorized as "true" – Obama was indeed photographed not putting his hand over his heart during the national anthem (not that it matters, but it is true. Snopes does a good job of putting this in its proper context.)
So, what have we learned: There are few circulating email "rumors" about McCain, and they tend to be positive and true. We can be sure that these are primarily McCain supporters that are responsible for forwarding these.
In contrast, there are many such forwarded emails about Obama, nearly all of them negative, and nearly all of them false (or only partly true). Certainly, these are not Obama supporters sending this crap along.
I think this is a wonderful illustration of the authoritarian mindset driving a large segment of McCain supporters (and/or Obama opponents). First, they value attacks against the enemy, even more so than supporting of their own. Divisiveness is king! Second, as a cursory glance at a few of these smears quickly tells you, xenophobia and racism are rampant. Again, Divisiveness is king! Thirdly, these folks are either gullible or have no respect for the truth. Most of these emails can be discredited with a single minute of research on the internet, yet they live long, long lives.
Obama supporters? Apparently they don’t forward chain emails. Hey, that alone will earn my loyalty!