Hughs: Rumor mill fueled by Internet stories [another hugh steenking pile]

knoxnews.com ^ | Friday, July 11, 2008 | By Ina Hughs

[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.

[Jabba the Nutt]

T Boone Pickens offered a million dollars to Kerry to prove one thing wrong in the Swiftboat Vet’s ads. [cue ‘Silence is Golden’]