Lies from the Right, in Your Email Inbox

I have an acquaintance—actually a high-school classmate with whom I re-established contact a few years ago—who likes to forward to me (and others) emails which I have to characterize as right-wing propaganda. And I use the word propaganda advisedly, with its suggestion of exaggeration and lies.

One such email contained a chart that purported to show what Medicare premiums are going to be under the Affordable Care Act (which the Right likes to call "Obamacare"). The chart showed that, four or five years out, Medicare premiums would reach a truly astounding, astronomical figure.

I did a little investigation and found out that the chart was simply and completely a lie. The fact is that Medicare premiums are not planned or announced four or five years in advance, as the chart purported, but are announced for the coming year only a few months before the start of a year. Thus no one—not the makers of the chart nor anyone in Washington—knows anything like that far in advance what Medicare premiums are going to be. (By the way, this example should remind all of us to look for some credit, some source or attribution for any "data" like that.)

The latest forward I received from my acquaintance was captioned something like "What the media won't show you." And what the media have, supposedly, been refusing to show us is a photograph. The photograph shows a man's body—living or dead, I don't think one could tell—being carried on the shoulder of another man.

The supposed story behind this photo: Supposedly the body is that of US Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens. The copy or text of the email claims that the ambassador was "dragged through the streets, sodomized, and murdered," and that this all was somehow Obama's fault. Admittedly I did not carefully read all of it; but it kept speaking of "Hussein Obama," who allegedly is too sympathetic to Islam to—what? avenge? prevent?--outrages to the US that are being committed in Muslim countries.

According to CBS television news, the Libyan government sent troops in, after the US Embassy compound in Benghazi was attacked. These troops found the ambassador, dead or dying, in the US Consulate, where he had gone to help evacuate consulate staff. If he was in fact dead or dying, then it has to be untrue that he was dragged through the streets and then murdered (let alone sodomized).

Some quotes from a September 21, 2012 Huffington Post article, quoting AP:

A Libyan doctor who treated Stevens said he died of severe asphyxiation, apparently from smoke.
. . .
Stevens was practically dead when he arrived close to 1 a.m. on Wednesday, but "we tried to revive him for an hour and a half but with no success," Abu Zeid [the doctor at the hospital] said. The ambassador had bleeding in his stomach because of the asphyxiation but no other injuries, he said.

But the brazen assaults - the first on U.S. diplomatic facilities in either country - underscored the lawlessness that has taken hold in Libya and Egypt after revolutions ousted their autocratic secular regimes and upended the tightly controlled police state in both countries.
. . . .
Moreover, security in both countries has broken down.
. . .
In Libya, central government control is weak, arms are ubiquitous and militias are pervasive.

So this, I would accept, is the true story. I am sure I don't have to emphasize how different this story is from that in the email I received.

And, note the name. Barack Obama's middle name is Hussein. During the 2008 election campaign, Obama's opponents on the Right liked to stress his middle name. It is, to be sure, an Islamic-sounding name. But what do they wish us to infer from that? There is a calumny that Obama is a Muslim that just won't go away.

To take these two emails together—plus many of the untrue things that some organizations have tried to say about gay people—upsets, enrages, and outrages me. The sheer immorality of these lies, of manufacturing tables of phony Medicare premiums; or taking a photo and claiming it shows Ambassador Stevens and then making up a backstory to that photo.

Update, May 27, 2013.
The television news reporting of the recent action by the Boy Scouts of America to allow gay boys and men to be Boy Scouts members and staffers included an inteview with a heavy man--presumably the father of a Boy Scout--who said on camera, "We're going to be required to teach homosexuality to boys as young as 6, up to 17."
I have to wonder who the "we" is supposed to be, and what he feels "teaching homosexuality" means. Maybe it means "tolerance," but he clearly meant something he viewed as pretty dire. The TV news article added that the Boy Scouts of America has denied this assertion; so my next thought is, Where did this man get that idea? I have to think this is yet one more example of  Right and homophobic organizations and individuals spreading misinformation and dysinformation.
Update, June 4, 2013
People who receive emails that contain "information" that seems dubious should be aware of a website called factcheck.org.
Here is their summary, for the end of 2012, of emails which have been circulating on the Internet and that include false "information": factcheck.org 2012 "viral spiral"

Copyright © 2012 by Richard Stein