The other day, I received an email from someone I respect. He had forwarded a piece that was allegedly written by a respected mainstream historian. It even had an introduction that said in part, "Lest you think it was written by some right-wing kook, David Kaiser is a respected historian whose published works have covered a broad range of topics..." and it goes on at length to state his credentials.

It looked realistic at first, and I didn't doubt the credentials until maybe about one-quarter through the piece...which turned into an anti-Obama screed, masquerading as serious journalism...with an attempt to cloak animosity in "educated" words. It basically said Obama is trying to turn the US into Nazi Germany. The problem, of course, is that it wasn't written by the historian David Kaiser, as Kaiser himself points out on his blog, and as pointed out by Snopes.

What disturbs me about pieces like this is that the fraudsters who attach the veneer of credibility are apparently good enough to fool people who I thought would not so easily be fooled. When people forward this kind of stuff around the internet, with a "Hey, look at this, even a respected mainstream historian says that Obama is following in Hitler's footsteps," it becomes problematic. Everyone knows that that the Nigerian bank holding $1 million for you is a nutty scam; not everyone knows that a mainstream historian did not actually write a hate-filled anti-Obama screed.

I am not quite sure that I convinced the person who sent the anti-Obama piece to me that the introduction was false--he hinted about political bias at Snopes, said Snopes has an agenda too, and implied that I shouldn't be so accepting of whatever Snopes says. Well, maybe there's something to that, but my question is that if Snopes has ever incorrectly labeled the truth as fraud, why haven't I heard someone complaining loudly that Snopes wronged them; that Snopes claimed that their e-mail was a fraud when it was actually true? And, btw, not everything on Snopes says: "False"...I have seen several items labeled "True" or "Partially True."

This reminds me of the time before the 2008 elections that someone e-mailed me an article "written by Maureen Dowd" about Obama taking a giant amount of overseas campaign donations, in flagrant violation of the law. The e-mail had the text of the alleged Dowd column pasted in and helpfully included a link to a real Maureen Down column on a different topic...ostensibly in hopes that if people actually clicked on the link, they would just assume the link was faulty, but still be convinced that Dowd wrote the words in the e-mail.

After I pointed out the sheer absurdity of it, the person who sent it finally admitted that Maureen Down didn't write it, but still believed that Obama was taking huge dollars in overseas donations, with the mainstream media ignoring it. Are you kidding me? All the networks, but especially Fox, would have been covering that giant scandal 24/7 if there were any proof of it happening. (And, some would say, even if there wasn't proof. A certain network would have likely been running a constant tagline that said: "Obama: Illegally Financing His Campaign with Foreign Money?")

Finally, the radical left of course is not immune to sending out scare-mongering, anti-right screeds. I heard from more than one person by way of forwarded e-mails, etc., that they believed that Bush was going to appoint himself permanent president in 2004, or that his jack-booted thugs were going to come for them in the night. Yes, and how did that turn out? Good grief and 'nuff said.