10/05/2007

Do me a favor, please!

Yesterday I was asked to fact-check an email circulating on the Internet – in this case since 1999.

And so it begins, the continuous forwarding of those undocumented and unsigned emails which go around the world spreading lies with no regard to the human beings they harm.

When a political ideology cannot stand on its own merits, apparently lies and smear campaigns are necessary to defeat the opposition. Such campaigns bank on the inability of persons who pass this crap along to think for themselves. I commended the recipient of this particular email for a desire to verify its veracity.

This one has a number of key words which easily can be entered into snopes.com’s search engine: Hillary Clinton, Black Panthers, Paul Harvey, Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

As an example of just how far the right-wing will go to vilify the Clintons, here’s the email in its entirety – with its last sentence declaring, “This is proven right by snopes.com:”

(Begin quoted email, emphasis is in original)

Subject: Hilliary

THIS WILL OPEN YOUR EYES!

Conveniently Forgotten Facts

By Paul Harvey

Back in 1969 a group of Black Panthers decided that a fellow black panther named Alex Rackley needed to die.

Rackley was suspected of disloyalty. Rackley was first tied to a chair. Once safely immobilized, his friends tortured him for hours by, among other things, pouring boiling water on him.

When they got tired of torturing Rackley, Black Panther member Warren
Kimbo took Rackley outside and put a bullet in his head.

Rackley's body was later found floating in a river about 25 miles north of New Haven, Connecticut.

Perhaps at this point you're curious as to what happened to these Black Panthers? In 1977, that's only eight years later, only one of the killers was still in jail. The shooter, Warren Kimbro, managed to get a scholarship to Harvard and became good friends with none other than Al Gore. He later became an assistant dean at a Conneticut State College. Isn't that something? As a '60s radical you can pump a bullet into someone's head and
a few years later, in the same state, you can become an assistant college
dean! Only in America!

Erica Higgins was the woman who served the Panthers by boiling the water
for Mr. Rackley's torture. Some years later Ms. Huggins was elected to a California school board.

How in the world do you think these killers got off so easy? Maybe it was
In some part due to the efforts of two people who came to the defense of the Panthers. These two people actually went so far as to shut down Yale University with demonstrations in defense of the accused Black Panthers during their trial. One of these people was none other than Bill Lan Lee.

Mr. Lee, or Mr. Lan Lee, as the case may be, isn't a college dean. He isn't a member of a California school board. He is now head of the United States Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, appointed by none other than Bill Clinton.

OK, so who was the other Panther defender? Is this other notable Panther defender now a school board member? Is this other Panther apologist now an assistant college dean? No, neither!

The other Panther defender was, like Lee, a radical law student at Yale University at the time. She is now known as the "smartest woman in the world." She is none other than the Democratic senator from the State of New York - our former first lady, the Incredible Hillary Rodham Clinton.

And now, as Paul Harvey said; "You know the rest of the story."

This deserves the widest possible press. (Where is our press???)

REMEMBER, "Hillary Rodham Clinton" IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

You must send this on to everyone you know.

This is proven right by SNOPES.COM
-END-

Contrary to the email author’s final words, snopes.com says the content of this email is “FALSE.” The site has an excellent report debunking this skillfully worded trash. Read the snopes.com report: LINK

If the persons who read, accept and forward such emails with no regard to authenticity would spend that time reading Bill Clinton’s “My Life” and “Living History” by Hillary Rodham Clinton, they would discover the good these two have done for both America and the world.

Do me a favor. If you receive such an email, don’t just delete it. Go to snopes.com, enter a few key words in the search engine, and inform its sender if its “status” is “FALSE.”

I have done this for years. It only takes a minute, and I promise it will make you feel good!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Jan has sent the snopes.com debunking of such emails countless times. What gets me is that after that is done, the same people send the same email tripe over and over, which proves that those who do not want to learn aren't going to learn.

People's memories can't be so short that they don't remember that they have circulated the same BS a jillion times. Makes ya want to stomp some sense into them!

'Nuff said.

Anonymous said...

The Mouseketeers were all killed in a traffic accident. Happy 50th Birthday to this urban myth.

Anonymous said...

I would think the last thing you'd want was to email this kind of person, giving them your address.
Wonder how they came up with Snopes, as in Faulkner's Snopes. Creepy. Eowyn

B.J. said...

Eowyn:

If you are replying to an email you have received, that person already has your address. There's no one threatening in my email address book.

Sometimes people just pass these emails along without checking, which was NOT the case with the person I got it from, my precious niece. She wanted to know if the story was true or false. Good for her!

As for snopes.com, it is, as pointed out in the post, THE Internet place to go to find out whether such emails are true or false - an indispensible site!

Snopes' analysis of this particular email - found in my reading room - is excellent!

As I said, it only takes a minute to stop one of these emails before they are spread and to inform the sender it is false. That's a good thing. :-)

BJ

Anonymous said...

Jan hits the "reply all" button when I send out Snopes.Com. If it's been forwarded umpteen times, I go down the list and send it to everyone who forwarded the damn thing.

I've received email asking who I am (truth seeker), delete me from your add. book (don't pride yourself, you definately are not in my book). I let them know that only ignorant people send out such false BS.

Yeah, I know; I'm blunt.