You see—conservatives have this garbage information network. It’s big; it has been since the rise of Rush Limbaugh in the early 1980s. In the last two decades it’s opened up countless Internet franchises. The result, in the swing state of Ohio:
In Flag City USA, False Obama Rumors Are Flying
By Eli Saslow
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 30, 2008; A04
FINDLAY, Ohio –
...On the television in his living room, (74 year old Ohio voter Jim) Peterman has watched enough news and campaign advertisements to hear the truth: Sen. Barack Obama, born in Hawaii, is a Christian family man with a track record of public service. But on the Internet, in his grocery store, at his neighbor's house, at his son's auto shop, Peterman has also absorbed another version of the Democratic candidate's background, one that is entirely false: Barack Obama, born in Africa, is a possibly gay Muslim racist who refuses to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
...Does he choose to trust a TV commercial in which Obama talks about his "love of country"? Or his neighbor of 40 years, Don LeMaster, a Navy veteran who heard from a friend in Toledo that Obama refuses to wear an American-flag pin?
Does he trust a local newspaper article that details Obama's Christian faith? Or his friend Leroy Pollard, a devoted family man so convinced Obama is a radical Muslim that he threatened to stop talking to his daughter when he heard she might vote for him?...
Well, ignorance and fear are the enemies of democracy—but how do you combat ignorance and fear when they’re intentionally propagated by a well-funded and well-established conservative political movement? How do you reach people like the people described in this article, who’ve been taught to prefer 1) rumors and lying b.s. circulated at the grass-roots level, to 2) factual, sourced information reported in the mainstream media?
Ohio’s a key state in the next election. And there’s no reason to doubt that what is described here in Ohio is going on in other key states. A triumph in the popular vote is not enough to put Barack Obama in the White House; he’s got to win swing states, win in the electoral college.
And conservatives are past masters at the art of the coordinated, lying smear; they’ve been doing it at least since the McCarthy era. And since then, their techniques have become increasingly sophisticated. They do it because it works, and in an era when their own record in office counts heavily against them—well, sowing paranoid lies is about all they’ve got left.
So I ask you—how do you combat this kind of thing? If these voters are important, and they’re being fooled by hateful lies, and they won’t believe or pay attention to media attempts to set the record straight—how do you set the record straight?
UPDATE: I got perfectly valid criticism for using more than three paragraphs of the Washington Post story in this diary, so I trimmed my quotation back quite a bit. I suggest you read the entire article at the link below if you want to see how the lies about Obama are circulating in this very Republican town. (But there's a lot of "local color" reporting that could have been dispensed with.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...