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Thursday, November 13, 2008
That Palin hoax
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Away from the office on the farm in South Georgia, where the task of this day is to reassemble a John Deere tractor, almost none of my conversations are with political junkies.
It was those conversations that told me that Gov. Sonny Perdue’s decision to suspend the gas tax during the first of the gas-availability panics that occurred during his administration was smart politics. My colleagues had pooh-poohed his actions as ineffective grandstanding. That’s not the way it was being seen by non-junkies, though.
In any event, I was shocked to hear it relayed as gospel that Sarah Palin thought Africa was a country. I’d not heard that allegation. Now it’s revealed. It was an elaborate Internet hoax foisted off on the mainstream news media. See New York Times story
Throughout the recent political campaign my mailbox was flooded with links to intriguing scoops, from Barack Obama’s birth in Kenya to MIchelle’s dining tab. I was never inclined to use them because I don’t trust sources I don’t know.
The Left hated and feared Sarah Palin and the first order of business was to tear her down, by ridicule, by untruths, by exaggerations and, in general, by any means possible. The hoax is an example.
Obama supporters would, no doubt, argue the same about Obama.
The question: How can you trust information in the blogosphere and, secondly, do you trust information more when it’s reported in the mainstream media?
Meanwhile, the spectacle to watch on the farm today is three guys trying to fix one tractor. The experienced tractor mechanic has bad knees, so he has to sit in a chair and give instructions to the tractor’s owner, a veteran farmer who has arthritis and can’t hold the wrench but can get on the ground and point to the right part, while the guy who knows nothing about fixing a tractor (me) does the work.
This could be a circus.
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