A Spectacular Falsehood

July 3rd, 2012 7:45am CST
UPDATE July 4th, 2012 8:00am CST: At this time, there is still no correction nor has there been any response to our requests for one. Contact @KarlRove, @AndrewCMcCarthy, @NROCorner or @RichLowry and demand that they explain themselves.

Have you heard the one about the President planning to spend Independence Day at a fundraiser in France? The rumor is all over the fringes of the right. Wedged in between hyperventilations over the President's "Kenyan birthplace" and "Agenda 21," the comments sections of our country's "anyone-but-Obama" blogs are full of it.

The story is, of course, as baseless as it is absurd. It is the kind of nonsense which has become so commonplace in the rumor-sphere that it would ordinarily not merit much discussion.

But this one is different. It's not just the web-rabble and the knuckle-draggers who are pushing it.

Over at the National Review, Andy McCarthy picked it up on Saturday morning. He ran with it. It's still there as I go to post, 72 hours later, without correction.

Even better, good old Karl Rove picked up the McCarthy link and tweeted it a short time later to his 353,000 followers. His post is also still up. He also hasn't issued any correction. In fact, he hasn't tweeted since.

Steve Benen writes:

"The reality is simple: neither the president nor his family are going to Paris for the 4th of July. They will, of course, be in the United States, celebrating the holiday at the White House, hosting an event for military families. Republican media outlets reporting otherwise are lying."

Benen is too kind. After three days, it seems clear that this is not cynical carelessness. This is coordinated propaganda.

Creeping Sharia?

June 15th, 2012

The entire premise is still nonsense. NRO's Matthew J. Franck takes a look at a study being hawked by the Islamophobic crowd and comes up empty:

"That’s all there is to the Center for Security Policy’s “Top 20 Cases.” Thirty-five years’ worth of American law, and we have a whopping seven cases in which some “foreign law” was honored (not even Sharia in every case), and not enough information even to tell if something truly unjust happened in any of the seven. In the other thirteen cases, Sharia-law principles were rejected either at trial or on appeal. Some Top 20."

Somebody tell Pam Geller. I can't wait to hear her spin this.

Thomas Sowell Jumps The Shark

April 10th, 2012

Sigh. This is what passes for great thinking in the post "Derb" NRO offices?

In his column today, Thomas Sowell first regurgitates long debunked smears about half of Americans not paying their "fair share" (that would be the poor half).

That this is mendacious propaganda is illustrated HERE, HERE and HERE.

On False Equivalence...

Jan 14th, 2011

As conservative writers from Malkin to Erickson have not only refused to address the merits of having a discussion on hateful rhetoric and weaponized language but have doubled down by accusing the Left of being "worse," it's notable how very easy it is to poke holes in their arguments of equivalence.

For the record, none of the defeated Democratic candidates in the last election marched their supporters into confrontations with Republican victors while their supporters shouted the word "JEW!"

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I figured that responses from the mainstream Right to this video on Lawrence O'Donnell's Last Word would have at least a trace of disavowal. I was wrong. Over at NRO, Jim Geraghty makes excuses for the racists. "We hear no threats on the tape," he writes. 


It's notable that one of the Popaditch supporters who was in the crowd is a white supremacist so extreme he has even been disavowed by Stormfront. Is it a stretch to suggest that there was something in Popaditch's rhetoric that this man found attractive?