No matter how bad things get, can we on the Left agree not to make up fake chain emails..... [View all]

[Tommy_Carcetti]

.......with fake quotes like the Right does?


This is in the wake of seeing a fake "quote" by Bill Cosby on Facebook spouting Limbaugh-esqe rhetoric that Cosby himself was compelled to warn was not his:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/imtired.asp

If that's not enough, I later came across another gem on Facebook where someone had quoted late night funnyman Conan O'Brien as saying, "Have you heard about McDonald's' new Obama Value Meal? Order anything you like and the guy behind you has to pay for it."

Now, I'm a big fan of the CoCo and watch the CoCo every night (thanks to the magic of DVR I love to watch him and The Daily Show back to back), and I never, ever remembered the CoCo ever saying anything remotely similar to that. So my BS meeting immediately rang.

This too appears to be a false quote part of a larger one victimizing every late night comic out there (other than Jon Stewart):

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=67372

As someone on the Snopes board pointed out, you know it was a hack job when even the jokes attributed to Jay Leno (arguably the late night host with the most appeal to a right of center audience) seemed ridiculously fabricated and lame.

And that's not all that has crept onto my Facebook page. In recent weeks, I've been subjected to claims that Adam Lanza never used an AR-15 rifle in the Sandy Hook Elementary Shootings (he did; the false rumor was based on a single piece of errant reporting the day after the shootings that was quickly corrected by the authorities) or that Sandy Hook "father" Bill Stevens had told "Congress" that they'd take his semi-automatic rifle from his cold dead hands (in actuality Stevens' child was not killed in the shootings nor was she even a Sandy Hook student but a student of a neighboring school, and Stevens' testimony was before a state legislative panel and not Congress).

Do these people seriously forget that the Internet exists to fact check blantantly false or errant stories? Do they even care when they lie or mislead? Or do they just operate with the hope that as long as some forwards on their deceitful chain email to everyone in their inbox or pastes it to Facebook, they've won the propganda battle?

Sheesh. So glad I gave up Facebook for Lent.