Snopes Is Your Friend

The election season always produces a bunch of nonsense stories floating around about the candidates--usually going both ways. I haven't noticed too many outrageous stories about McCain this time around, but there's more than enough about Obama. About his religion, about revolutionary activities, and about associations with undesirables. It's enough to make a man crazy.

This sort of shady image-blurring nonsense fits into what Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post calls

an article of faith among many Democratic believers that has been so long and deeply held it is hardly considered noteworthy: that Democratic policies are so obviously superior, and so much more in the interest of a majority of voters, that only some form of chicanery can explain Republican election victories.

I can see that meme, and I even agree with it. Especially when I check my email.

We all have one: that relative whose worldview is completely different from ours. A person who, if we weren't related by blood or by marriage, we'd probably have had no reason to get to know. But since we do know them, have a lifetime of history with them in some cases, we can love them even though they're wrong wrong wrong about everything political.

I have a relative I'll call Relative X. For the last six months Relative X has been forwarding to me every email the conservative smear machine has produced regarding Obama or Clinton. Every time I recieve one I check Snopes, provide the link in my reply and type some variation of "This is false. Here are pictures/testimony/ blood samples to prove it. Love, Jason." Now Relative X sends me these asking me what Snopes thinks of it. I'm happy to oblige, and actually, I'm happy to get these emails, because then I can see for myself just how pathetic conservatives can be in their ignorance and dishonesty.

Here's the latest smear I got:

Subject: WHAT A DISGRACE!!!

Obama The Patriot - Removes American Flag From His Plane

Barack Obama recently finished a $500,000 total overhaul of his 757. And as part of the new design, he decided to remove the American flag from the tail...

What American running for President of the United States would remove the symbol of his country? And worse, he replaced the flag with it with a symbol of himself...

Please forward this on if you're not ashamed of your country or it's [sic] flag & think this is a disgrace!

Actually, I had to clean up the email because it had been forwarded so many times it was full of arrows and funky line breaks and such. But the difference between this email and the others I've gotten is that this isn't an outright fabrication--it's just a loony distortion of what really happened.

The Snopes link regarding this story, and the photos it uses in support of its analysis, make it pretty clear that the panic in this email is completely over the edge.

This is the plane that the Obama campaign acquired:
and this is what it looks like now:
As you can see, the American flag on the tail of the plane has been replaced with Obama's campaign logo. Wow--looks like those outraged conservatives were right! Right?

Wrong.

That flag on the tail isn't just the American flag--it's North American Airlines' logo. It's displayed prominently on their website. Seems to me it wouldn't be very smart to leave the prior owner's identification on the vehicle you just bought. But, hey. I'm not a conservative trying to panic a bunch of sheeple into voting for a mummy.

Oh, and there is still an American flag on Obama's plane:
But there doesn't seem to be one on McCain's:
Hmmm. I guess the conservatives should be outraged . . .