Speaking of debunking myths...

One of my favorite things to do on the internet is reading web pages devoted to debunking myths. Snopes and e-mail Junkyard are my favorites. Whenever I receive one of those mass e-mails that your friend you haven't heard from in months sends to you and about 50 other people with a subject line like: "Beware, Congress will soon charge postal rates for e-mail!" or "Congress to shutdown NEA unless you sign this petition NOW!", I go right to snopes, get the facts and send the info back to my friend. We usually get a good laugh out of it.

However, I remember in the 2000 election as things were coming down to the wire, I got an e-mail from a friend with "quotes" from George W. Bush's past. As you can imagine, they were all set up to make him look like the enormous imbecile that Republicans are always assumed to be (unless their Richard Nixon, in his case he was brilliant but EVIL!, now that I think of it, W is portrayed as both dumb AND evil... can he be both?, wow, this is the longest parenthetical statement EVER!) At the end of the e-mail my friend wrote: Please people, we can't let a moron like this be our president, I urge you to vote and tell your friends to vote for Gore, for the sake of our country and our reputation in the world.

Something about these quotes sounded familiar to me. I remember back in the 1992 campaign, I received a xerox sheet of paper (this was before e-mail) from one of my employees with a list of quotes from Dan Quayle. Many of the quotes were the same. - By the way, is it just because I'm in Southern California that I keep getting all of these unsolicited documents about the evilness and stupidity of Republicans?, or is it because I'm in the entertainment business? or is it because lefties are more inclined to unleash propagandist, ad homenim, vitriol to their friends putting them on the spot and forcing them to either feign an association with their views, or risk a confrontation over ideological grounds that are not supposed to be polite in social settings?.

Anyway, to make a short story even longer, I e-mailed back to her a link showing these Dan Quayle "quotes" and told her that she should really investigate the source of things before she start spreading it around to so many people, she could lose her credibility. It's not like she worked for CBS News. In this case, she was actually angry at me! We did not share a good laugh, in fact, it kind of affected our relationship.

But, I WAS RIGHT!!!

Here is proof of my point.
This is a page devoted to "Quotes" from Dan Quayle.
This is a page devoted to "Quotes" from George W. Bush.

Notice something? Now it took me all of 30 seconds to perform this search, don't you think someone should at least do this before getting their hate-politics in my in-box?