The New Right-Wing Smear Machine...

'On February 27, 2001, two members of the American Gold Star Mothers, an organization of women who've lost sons or daughters in combat, dropped by the temporary basement offices of the new junior senator from New York, Hillary Clinton. They didn't have an appointment, and the office, which had been up and running for barely a month, was a bit discombobulated. The two women wanted to talk to the senator about a bill pending in the Senate that would provide annuities for the parents of those killed, but they were told that Clinton wasn't in the office and that the relevant staff members were otherwise engaged. The organization later submitted a formal request in writing for a meeting, which Clinton granted, meeting and posing for pictures with four members of the group.

But the story doesn't end there. In May of that year, the right-wing website NewsMax, a clearinghouse for innuendo and rumor, ran a short item with the headline "Hillary Snubs Gold Star Mothers." Reporting via hearsay--a comment relayed to someone who then recounted it to the column's author--the article claimed that Clinton and her staff "simply refused" to meet with the Gold Star Mothers, making hers the "only office" in the Senate that snubbed the group.

At first the item didn't attract much attention, but it quickly morphed into an e-mail that started ricocheting across the Internet. "Bet this never hits the TV news!" began one version. "According to NewsMax.com there was only one politician in DC who refused to meet with these ladies. Can you guess which politician that might be?... None other than the Queen herself--the Hildebeast, Hillary Clinton."'

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071112/hayes

I honestly don't know the people who start lies like this one can live with themselves.

winning and continued access to power is the only thing on their minds

which debunked it.

The e-mail came from a former classmate who'd found my address on classmates.com. Her first letter was okay, but the second included this piece of trash. I sent the snopes page to everyone on her e-mail list and never heard from her again.

As we get closer and closer to the election they're going to ramp up the number of these lies keeping us off balance trying to stamp out the fires.

The best way to deal with this stuff is to get the truth out as quickly as possible and then get ready for the next barrage of lies.

x(

Stuff like this Gold Star mother thing with Hillary will seem trivial to the attacks on her next year by the Reich Wing.

Unlike most other Dems, when the repukes attack Hillary, her approval #'s go up. It happened during the Clinton admin, and it's happening now during this campaign.

They don't care how they get the intended results, and truth has no bearing on their actions.

Anything GOP is riddled with sociopathy.

One e-mail falsely described a Senate committee hearing in the 1980s where Oliver North offered an impassioned Cassandra-like warning about the threat of Osama bin Laden, only to be dismissed by a condescending Democratic senator. Originally it was Al Gore who played the role of the senator, but by 2004 it had changed to John Kerry. "You just plug in your political front-runner du jour," Ratliff says.

...the article could have also mentioned that the letter was also lying about Ollie's "warning" (North actually named Abu Nidal, not bin Laden, in the exchange the letter purports to quote).

...although it's touched on at the end where the guy says he could forge an e-mail to look as is it were from Steve Jobs or anyone else (during discussion of the untraceability of these smear-mails), one of the tools these letters use to stoke the outrage of readers is to attribute the original to a war hero or someone they can expect many of the readers to regard as highly respectable.

One prominent example is Comdr. Hamilton McWhorter, USN(ret), a WW2 fighter pilot noted for being the first Hellcat ace. His name has been fraudulently attached to a number of smear-letters, including the Gold Star Mothers letter the article mentions as well as a number of "Blame Bill Clinton for 9/11" letters (which list a litany of right-wing allegations of Clinton's laxity towards national security (some of which are matters of opinion, most are demonstrably false)).

So even smear-mail that does claim to be attributed to someone can't be taken at face value either. (not that anyone here didn't know that, but it's worth reminding people less accustomed to these than we are.)

:thumbsup: