Remember in the week before the 2007 election those Liberal campaign goons, including Jackie Kelly’s husband, who were caught distributing fake leaflets from a fake Islamic extremist group that supposedly supported Labor?
And remember how Labor went on to win in a landslide once it became clear that Liberal supporters were prepared to fan religious tensions in order to win an election?
Well, today in the USA an eerily similar hoax has just been uncovered. This time it’s a McCain campaign volunteer, 20 year old Ashley Todd from Texas who claimed she was mugged, beaten and mutilated by a black man while trying to withdraw money from an ATM in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvannia. She even posted photos of herself online to show her injuries, except…
…the black eye is obviously makeup.
…the B (for Barack) on her face was “carved” backwards (as though done in a mirror).
…the ATM security camera footage didn’t show her at the ATM.
…her Twitter profile contains entries that aren’t consistent with her having being beaten and mutilated.
Now she’s confessed to police it was a hoax and faces charges for filing a false police report.
And now the McCain campaign is irredeemably tarred with the notion that at least some supporters are prepared to start a race war if they think it’ll help them in the polls.
That didn’t stop some media outlets, most prominently Fox News, running with the story for some time this morning until the hoax was revealed. Then they back-pedaled faster than Lance Armstrong from a drug test.
But it was The Drudge Report that first broke the story
For running with such a tenuous and obvious hoax, it is Matt Drudge and the merry Fox bandoliers who win the inaugural Agincourt Award for the Longest Bow in Journalism.
Sorry to all the Australian journalists who tried so hard to win it, but the awards have been gazumped at the last minute by a foreign news story.
I’m not linking to any of the hoaxed reporters because they don’t deserve the link juice. What is it with wingnuts? They believe the Moon landing was faked but were fooled by this cockamamie story?
Well, at least that settles who drew the Longest Bow this year. New award nominations now being accepted below…
It’s an outrage!
The McCain campaign viciously mugged … by reality.
Doubtless, the tsunami of despair engulfing the Republicans will provoke many such acts in the dying days of McCain’s doomed campaign.
They have no shame.
This is bad news…for Obama
OK, out of lurking for this. Shaun, I’d love to see you justify that claim (that a story about a McCain worker lying to the police in an obvious smear attempt is going to be bad news… for Obama). I’d like to see the chain of thinking there.
A more apt comparison to the Kelly scandal would be the “Obama Bucks” distributed by the GOP in California. But this one’s pretty pathetic, too.
There is no Ashley Todd. Ashley Todd never existed.
Oh dear! this certainly looks ugly.
The chain of thinking is…I’m just repeating a little joke that arose out of someone a while ago trying to spin some bad news for McCain as being actually bad news for Obama.
So tongue is firmly in cheek. Carry on.
You’d have to think that Ashley Todd is actually a Democrat plant to make McCain look bad for whipping up racial tension.
Once the socialist Hussien is exposed for his part in this dastardly scam, McCain will win the election and Matt Drudge will get a Pulitzer Prize.
So there and na, na, na, na.
Spoken like a true wingnut, joe2.
Ta.
Well, you’ve gotta admire her devotion to her cause.
Mutilation in the cause of Dear Leader: Sounds very North Korean.
Still, I reckon I’d draw the line at cutting my own nuts-off, smearing “Vote Liberal” in blood across my belly and telling Mr Plod that Truffles Turnbull done it.
Oh, okay. Sorry Shaun, thought you were serious and my mind was boggled at the idea.
Evan @ 11:
Wow, just…wow.
Self-mutilating McCainist jihadis, huh?
I wonder if they’ll sturm-putsch a vote counting centre again?
I cant wait to see these ugly, rotten, cheating people LOSE.
Yep. This about sums it up.
And Olbermann is good.
“Ashley, Ashley, Ashley.
I specifically told you to describe your attacker as a lighter skinned African American with big ears, wearing a suit and tie. I also told you to cut an “X” into your FOREHEAD, not your cheek.
You are not to return to my circle of trust.
See Ya,
Charlie Manson”
From comments…..”Wired”
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/10/college-republi.html
The story might not be true in the narrow pedantic sense that technically this particular incident may not have occurred in precisely the manner portrayed in the media. However it’s true in the broader and far more important metaphysical sense in that it reminds us there are millions of black men who mug white girls and carve ‘B’ (or even better, ‘H’) in their faces in the alternative reality of their consciousness.
Can there be any doubt that such incidents will be common under a socialist Obamamessiah Administration with Hussein’s terrorist pals running the Justice Department?
The story is indeed therefore very bad news for Obama.
I see the link to the Linsay Leaflet link in that it was politically motivated and completely faked, but there is something about this that goes beyond the idiocy of the leaflets. This was brutal in it’s emotive message, and orchestrated in isolation with malicious intent.
The leaflets were bad, don’t get me wrong, but I doubt anyone would have seriously thought they would swayed too many votes even it they weren’t picked for fakes. If this has succeed, there would be repercussions that would go beyond this campaign, that could have lead to some truly abhorrent outcomes.
This is the tip of the iceberg isn’t it? This really is just a small portion of how deep these divisions run in American society, exactly how much more pressure is it going to take for this country to fall into civil war again?
PinkyOz.
Good to see that some people are rising above the politics to show a little empathy for Ms Todd.
joe2 – you’ll enjoy these.
I got the very first accusation in the girls (now deleted) blog yesterday.
I was hoping I was right when I accused her of faking it, and whatya know…
woulda looked terrible if I was wrong though @_@
Im da man
“And remember how Labor went on to win in a landslide once it became clear that Liberal supporters were prepared to fan religious tensions in order to win an election?”
How can anyone else win the Longest Bow award when you’ve written this? The bit that comes after “once it became clear” should be “that John Howard wasn’t going to dump WorkChoices”. As it stands the statement overstretches enormously and attempts to construct a cause and effect that simply never existed. Perhaps I’ve missed the arch-irony here.
BBB
Is this event an actual hoax?… or a hoax of a hoax?
According to FiveThirtyEight, there’s one sentence that Obama volunteers are starting to hear: “We’re voting for the n*gger.” It sounds a little too Blazing Saddles to be true, but that’s the second time the site has reported the story.
BBB, I was around Sydney when it happened and it seemed like the last straw for a lot of folks out west. It received saturation media coverage here and a lot of vox pops of people pouring disgust on the Libs for it.
But really, I’m not the best person to answer your question. Why don’t you ask Jackie Kelly if she thinks I’m drawing too long a bow?
It also ensured that Howard was absolutely unable to get any message out right at the end of the campaign, and reinforced the shambolic nature of the entire Liberal effort, as well as entrenching further the whole “would do anything to get elected” thing that haunted Howard all through 2007.
Make no mistake – it was a big own goal, and Howard knew it.
Meh. The Liberals were well and truly gone about three months out, if not six. And Howard knew it. Jackie Kelly’s husband’s escapades were of marginal importance, at the very best. I suspect this 20-year old’s idiocy will be similarly marginal in effect.
BBB
Yes, it was the final nail in the coffin. It was the last of a typical series of debacles from just before Beazley left and is still continuing.
It happened at the end of the Hawke Keating years and after the Thatcher Major era.
Mark:
Funny thing about that, Mark. Here too on CNN, MSNBC, Fox, there have been people ringing or texting in messages saying exactly that sort of thing: “this shows they’ll do anything to stay in power” and “this shows McCain’s campaign has gone off the rails”…those sorts of reactions.
In neither case was either action instigated by the official campaigns. In neither case were the official campaigns aware of the hoaxers’ actions until it was too late to stop them. And yet the hoaxes originate from campaign volunteers and associates, and so the campaign ends up ‘guilty by association’…hmm. Hoist, petard, much?
Mercurius, yep.
BBB, nothing like this is without significance in electoral terms. Let’s not forget the polls moved back towards the Liberals during the campaign. There’s never a lay down misere election – well, hardly ever.
Trivial events such as the Kelly and Todd provocations, when exposed, clarify for the wider voting public who take only a marginal interest in politics, an occasion to arrive at a final resolution not to vote for the offending party.
There is nothing ideological in this resolution. This resolution is driven by a temporarily awakened sense of common decency.
If there is such a thing as a lay-me-down open misere in politics, the 2008 election (absent a “lone nut” with a gun) is it.
Everyone except posters to this forum decided days ago that, as Ashley Todd is mentally ill, the incident wouldn’t affect the campaign to any degree.
Meanwhile, in the colonial media…
There is no Ashley Todd – Ashley Todd never existed. Almost.
Thanks for the GOP talking point primer, AdamRobertT.
Perhaps you have overlooked Americans’ continuing irritation over the alacrity with which the RWDB press, particularly Fox and Drudge, embraced poor, sick Ashley as a reliable source of beneficial news.
Then again, you could be correct. Americans may well have got used to being routinely lied to by now. They’ve had so much practice at it, after all.
I’ve long been convinced that what finally won the undecideds over to Rudd in the dying weeks of the last election was decency- a recognition that Rudd had a sense of it in spades and that the Libs en masse had lost it entirely. It is also, in my opinion, what is putting even many long-time Republicans into the Obama camp. At last, McCain/Palin. Have you no shame?
FOX News Executive VP John Moody no less, AdamRobertT:
http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/10/23/jmoody_1023/
“the B (for Barack) on her face was “carved” backwards (as though done in a mirror).”
Now that’s just elitist physicists talking. Don’t you know that mirrors reflect whatever Republicans want them to reflect, kinda like Fox.
Maybe what won the undecideds over at the last minute was that after 10 years of voting indecency, it wasn’t working. Howard had thrown just about everyone overboard, and we weren’t better off for it.