Posted on 07/10/2008 9:55:35 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
Sticks and stone may break your bones - but words can destroy.
Think about the Swift Boat campaign and what it did to John Kerry in 2004 and what rumors of a secret love child did to John McCain's bid for the White House in 2000.
~~snip~~
The Internet is making it easy to set these little fires and fan them into a blaze of untruths, and this election has become so intense that groups wanting to undermine the other guy have sunk to a new level.
Unregulated attack groups like the 2004 Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, called 527s after the section of the Internal Revenue code that allows them to raise unlimited cash, fool people into believing outlandish things that go unchallenged across the Internet.
~~snip~~
In a recent article in The Washington Post dealing with the new brand of high-tech smear tactics, political theorist Danielle Allen at Princeton University spoke about her determination to go to the source of the vitriolic THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO e-mail messages. She was able to track it back to a posting on the Web site FreeRepublic.com, and a man named Andy Martin, a former political opponent of Obama's who first got the idea while trying to launch a Senate bid against Obama.
~~snip~~
It is almost impossible to quell such blasphemous and damaging rumors. The FEC found the Swift Boat attack was way out of line and chastised them for it, but the damage was done. And there are still those who take what they said as gospel.
The big lie keeps churning.
It is always interesting how these ‘unfounded attacks’ never have an ‘absolute denial’ which includes ‘incontriverable proof’ attached to it. Has John Kerry released his unedited record yet?
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Thank goodness we have our peerless print urnalists to keep those nasty upstarts on the Intermets in line ;’}
Blasphemous? It is vitriolic to say Obama was a Muslim? I wonder what Muslims think about that? He might have been exposed to Islam in his childhood, but he isn’t a Muslim. What Obama is; is everything and nothing and a member of the Universal Church of Oprah.
Who's smearing who? The mainstream media is waging a preemptive war against Free Republic to protect the Obamessiah from being exposed by the expert B.S. (Barbra Streisand) detecting Freepers.
Oh really...I guess she can't be any more specific?
To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever disputed the truth of SBVT.
Has he released it yet, YOU MUST BE JOKING that ASSWIPE WILL NEVER SIGN THE 180, and the world will never see what a real scumbag he is.
The Swift Boat Vets bought TV ad time, appeared on talk radio, published a book, appeared on MSM news shows, etc. On the Internet we talked to each other about what we saw in the mainstream. The Internet as bogeyman don’t hunt.
The only thing they did was remind me how much the left and Democrats wanted McCain. They started the rumors.
The FEC found the Swift Boat attack was way out of line and chastised them for it, but the damage was done. And there are still those who take what they said as gospel.
The FEC said nothing about the veracity of the Swift Vets' charges, of course. That isn't their job. They did write this:
"Following an investigation, the Commission concluded that SwiftVets did not unlawfully coordinate its activities with, or make excessive in-kind contributions to, any federal candidate or political party committee...As they did with virtually all the major 527 organizations active in 2004, the FEC ruled that the Swift Vets intended to affect the election (duh), and therefore should have formed as a political action committee. Former FEC chairman Bradley Smith accused the commission of punishing such groups not for making errors in how they filed, but for "criticizing politicians."
The implication in this article that the FEC somehow refuted any of the Swift Vets' charges against Kerry is, quite simply, a lie.
My Sargent asked what was wrong with me and I told him that he must not have heard that I had a complaint filed against me, he said "yeah, so?". He then explained the true nature of the world in on sentence: " If they aren't bitchin' about you I would assume you aren't doing your job".
Looks like you're doing your job Jim!
Another attempt to discredit the truth seekers at Free Republic. They can if they saturate, which might be their intent, but it would take too much time from their other propagandizing. They’ll probably assign a couple of journalists to this project to minimize their expense and maximize their other persuits, however those couple of journalists will soon wear out their cries of “wolf”.
They’ll be off on somebody, something else soon enough.
The FEC is not a trier of fact, except as it relates to Federal Election Law, therefore, any action against the SBVT would have nothing to say about the truth or falsity of their position, a fact she probably knows full well.
The FEC ruling also included MoveOn.org and The League of Conservation Voters, a fact which didn't push the media template of her little hit piece. All parties settled out of court... yawn.
So what was the posted and who posted it?
For a "gotcha" moment, this story is long on words and short on facts.
Where's the beef?
This is nothing more than what's been with us from the beginning.
"A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." Mark Twain.
For any part that is indeed lies let them argue that issue and not make free speech the "issue."
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You claim that "The FEC found the Swift Boat attack was way out of line and chastised them for it, but the damage was done. And there are still those who take what they said as gospel."
This suggests that the FEC somehow refuted the Swift Vets' charges against Kerry, which is completely false. It isn't the FEC's job to validate the claims made by political groups, nor do they make any effort to do so. The FEC did note that the Swift Vets "did not unlawfully coordinate its activities with, or make excessive in-kind contributions to, any federal candidate or political party committee..."
The FEC also levied a fine against the Swift Vets, as they did to virtually all the major 527 organizations active in 2004, ruling that since they intended to affect the election they should have formed as political action committees.
If you're really concerned about honesty in political discussions, retracting your misleading characterization of the FEC's actions would be a fine place to start.
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I'll be surprised to see a retraction or correction. If Ina Hughs intended to write an honest article, she would have done so in the first place.
Woe is the gravitas of calumny.
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