One of the most frustrating things about being a blogger is the constant smacking down of mistatements, rumors and outright lies coming out of the rightwing. J.L. Bell at Salon noticed a constant stream of rumors being examined by the Snopes.com website and did a count to see what was happening.
After eight years in the White House (with Snopes.com around all that time), George W. Bush has been the subject of 47 internet rumors. After less than two years in office, Barack Obama has been the subject of 87, or nearly twice as many.
Even more telling is the relative accuracy of those stories. For Bush, 20 rumors, or 43%, are true. Only 17, or 36%, are false. The remainder are of mixed veracity (4), undetermined (4), or unclassifiable (2).
In contrast, for Obama only 8 of the 87 rumors, or 9%, are true, and a whopping 59, or 68%, are whoppers. There are 17 of mixed veracity and 3 undetermined.
I delved down to the stories that the site designates as a mixture of truth and falsehood. For Obama, in many cases the truth is innocuous while the lie reflects poorly on the President, particularly photographs that are misrepresented or show behavior that produced no complaints when his predecessors did the same. In contrast, in this mixture of truth and falsehood about George W. Bush praying with an injured soldier, the lie reflected well on that President from the perspective of the religious person spreading it.
I think this story makes things a bit clearer. It’s the telephone game version of Fox News and apparently the dominance of Fox News is not enough to keep conservatives from spreading these rumors through other means.
Personally I find some of the so-called reasonable conservatives as the most dishonest of the bunch. These are the people that will say things like “I believe Obama was born in the U.S. but if he’d just show his birth certificate it would all go away.” They are reinforcing the crazies and just because they’re not carrying Obama = Hitler signs that doesn’t mean that they’re not equally responsible for spreading the falsehoods.