When you’re going to use a tag called Teh St00pid, it’s probably a good idea to make sure the St00pid person in question isn’t the one you see in the mirror.
What’s sad about this incident is how utterly typical it is of the right-wing blogosphere. I was able to figure out with just a few clicks that the allegation being made was utter bullshit, and several other alert readers were as well. But apparently that’s too much work if you’re a right-leaning blogger. Just take some even-further-right leaning blogger’s word for it and lay on the snark.
[For those who are too lazy to click through the links, the incident in question is one in which President Obama sent a letter to former French president Chirac, in which he said he looks forward to future cooperation. The immediate cry across Right Blogistan was that Obama is too stupid to know who the president of France is, and that sending such a letter was a huge slight against President Sarkozy, and how all this would have gotten so much more media coverage if Bush had pulled a boneheaded move like this. The truth, courtesy of one of Uncle's readers, is that Obama was replying to a letter he received from Chirac regarding Chirac's charitable foundation, and nobody important in France perceived any such slight. But that doesn't stop right wingers from jumping all over it and whining and crying about how Bush would have been eviscerated for doing the same thing.]
UPDATE: Uncle responds:
Just because I reported it as if it were true, ridiculed the president and the media as if it were true, and expressed exactly zero skepticism about the “flap” as reported doesn’t mean that I bought that shit.
OK, that’s not exactly what he said, but he’s still sailing down a famous Egyptian river, as far as I’m concerned.
leanleft
Kevin
tgirsch
Kevin T. Keith
Judd
[...] Tom points out that a story I linked to was not accurate. I would say it was my error except that, uh, it wasn’t. [...]
I do agree that people on the right jumped on that and ran with it, but to be honest, if Bush had done that, the Left and the Media would have run with it just as hard and then very quietly admitted the error (if at all).
On something like that, I seriously doubt it. I’m not saying that Left Blogistan doesn’t have echo-chamber qualities about it — of course it does — but running with an obviously false and easy to disprove meme like that one isn’t part of the left’s MO. The only example I can think of on the left was the forged memos flap of 2004, and even there, while the memos themselves were forged, their contents were verified to be accurate.
But it does serve as a cautionary tale — if it sounds too good (or bad) to be true, if it fits your preconceptions too neatly, you need to be VERY careful.
Which is one of the reasons I didn’t run with it. I don’t read French, and the only non-blog source I could find for the story was in French, so I let it go. Besides, the whole “gift of 25 DVDs to the UK PM encoded for the US” was a much richer gaffe.
And yes, the left blogosphere would have run with it hard & fast, and complained that the corporate media wasn’t paying attention.
To be fair, I’m a centrist, I think both the right and the left are generally full of it, which means I get to pick on everybody.
Yea me!
When you spend your life sitting on fence posts, you wind up with a fence post up your arse.
Plastic turkey! That one’s still going around unimpeded.
Funny, I’d never heard of the plastic turkey thing, and had to Google it to figure out what the hell you were talking about…