I must admit that I do not have an answer but the topic very much intrigues me, because I also sense a similarity in these rumors. It also has the flavor of the swift-boat story that hurt John Kerry and the earlier, very silly rumor about Clinton bringing an airport to a complete halt so he could get his hair cut while in AF1.
I am not generally a conspiracy-theorist in practice but this stuff does seem organized. Or, maybe it’s just the media running with anything they can so more people will click on their sites.
There’s the old saw attributed to Napoleon “never attribute to malice what can best be explained by incompetence.”
I suppose the answer to the OP brings up a corollary we can assert, “also never ascribe to conspiracy what can best be explained by rumormongering and wishful groupthink.” People hear something as speculation, want it to be so, and repeat it often enough that they begin to believe it, especially as others build on the sandy foundation.
Sure, there are various groups, particularly in the other party, who issue talking points that the hard-of-thinking repeat too slavishly word-for-word; but the groups that put these out are interested in legitimate public debate (that is, making valid points but with their spin), and are not about to issue bulletins with patently false assertions that can easily be checked. The rumor mill can pile up that crap on is own.
The birther controversy is a classic example. Nobody seriously mainstream said Obama was born outside the USA. (In fact, to my mind that was one of the ways to define nutbar vs. serious mainstream); but many knew exactly what to say to egg on the nutbars and keep the controversy alive.
I wonder too if some Democrats rub their hands with glee every time birther conspiracy craptrap comes up, because it demonstrates to the more reasonable, more middle of the road voters - the ones Democrats hope to snag - “see, that other faction is just crazies!”
I’d say it’s the template thing. It’s a style of storytelling for political scandal, and has cousins in the world of CT, woo, and UFOs. Then it’s all enhanced by cookie cutter coverage by the media.
Snopes saw a surge of this sort of thing starting in 2000. It seems to be more a right-wing thing than a left wing thing. Specifically, 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. 2. As with regards to sourcing, 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. … The author then traces that rumor as best he can.
The process appears to be mostly organic, aided by townhall.com, credulousness, a modern conservative echo-chamber, emotional needs and a certain temperament, apparently widely shared. What I think is most telling though is the quote by Gerald DeSimone, a 74-year-old veteran from Ridgewood, New Jersey, who describes his politics as “to the right of Attila the Hun.”: “I get a million of them! … 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.” If there are hundreds or even dozens of nodes like that, a weird kind of filtering mechanism might select for a couple of favored rhetorical styles.
The casual reader, reading this quote from the article you cite, would walk awya thinking that the Snopes collection about Bush is about evenly split between positive and negative e-mail, yes?
I counted 52 items. Eighteen are listed as false. Several are “undetermined,” such as the claim that Bush asked a visiting Brazilian dignitary if they had blacks in Brazil, too. But in the comments, the Snopes writers say:
Similar treatment goes to the “Bush Double Standards” e-mail, purporting to list how many times prior to 9-11 Bush mentioned Al-Queada vs. mentioning Iraq or Saddam Hussein, the implication being that Bush was not focusing on AQ at all. Snopes simply says undetermined.
In contrast, of the 22 Kerry items, it’s true most are characterized as false. But not all, as the article claims. The photo of Kerry next to Fonda at an anti-war rally, Kerry calling a Secret Service agent a son of a bitch, and his statement to Larry King that he hasn’t had time to be briefed on Al-Queada attack possibilites are all noted as true. And Snopes gives an “undetermined” to the account of a man who reported Kerry’s remarks aboard an airplane, even though the article reports that the original author was found and confirms the story (although he does regret the national attention and believes they weren’t releavnt to the election).
In short, the article you cite makes it seem like a very one-sided issue, but the actual Snopes information dispells that. I guess the answer is – always check Snopes.
I think you misunderstand, Bricker. The claim is not that the Bush ones were split between true and false, but that they were split between positive and negative. While the Kerry ones were uniformly negative.
This is precisely why I suspect some (not all, obviously) of these phrases to be “seeded” amongst key right-wing news sources, which are then repeated by the readership. PPACA was “rammed down our throat”, the bottom 50% of income earners need some “skin in the game”, Americans just “want our country back”… When I see and hear these phrases repeated **verbatim **on FoxNews, by Rush, by RW talking heads, and then on messageboards (including this one), it does look suspicious.
Or maybe it’s just a function of having a small number of dedicated RW news sources which then have an undue influence on their viewers. I dunno.
I was thinking more of the Obama is a Muslim stories that started early in the primaries. I think they were more likely spread by the Clinton campaign than any Republican, since at the time Obama was considered very unlikely to emerge as the Democratic candidate.
And it shouldn’t be impossible to prove there is not a common source for these stories.
ETA: :smack: You were referring to the Muslim story.
The Bush collection has six that are clearly laudatory: witnessing Christ for a teenage boy, saluting an injured officer, a prayerful encounter at a church, kind words after a speech in Shanghai, praying with an injured Army officer, and Bush’s “eco-friendly” ranch.
Several others I don’t know how to characterize. For example, one mail says, “Whther you’re on the left or the right, this is something to be concerned about,” and goes on to note that Bush appointed a pro-life person to an FDA committee on reproductive drugs. The tone of the e-mail is not laudatory, but I suppose a pro-life recipient would be pleased and a pro-choice recipient horrified. So is that mail positive, or negative?
I’ve always thought that campaigns and parties have groups that are tasked with putting out these ridiculous rumors. So Candidate X has his lackeys put out a rumor that Candidate Y married a thespian in New York, is a communist, and didn’t call his mother on Mother’s Day. Let all of that sink in for a week or two, let the nutballs run with it for a while, and then have Candidate X come out and publicly disclaim all of it and say that Candidate Y is a great man, but one that he has a difference of opinion with.
The dirt is out there for the nutters to hit Candidate Y with, and Candidate X looks very statesman-like and appeals to moderates for disavowing these tactics.
I also interpreted positive as “laudatory” and negative as “derogatory”.
If an email is framed as “Something to be concerned about” I would call it negative.
Maybe you could provide a link to the part of snopes where they list the Bush emails. I would do it myself, but I’d like to be sure that we’re on the same page (there may be more than one search method or link after all).
I just quoted the Nation article. Kudos for checking out the claims made. Also, if you locate any other articles that address the OP, please share – that article was the only thing I found. (Um, my quotation style for offsite articles isn’t misleading, is it?)
Did you actually read the article you linked to? It seems to me that it bears out what I said.
There is no hint there of any Republican bureau of black propaganda. It is just idiots spreading stupid rumors. (Of course, they have a lot of idiots.)
ducks and runs out of the thread.