You know those lame e-mails that miscreants send around about your favorite politicians? Those screeds filled with "facts" -- most of which are easily debunked -- that clog your inbox during election season? Of course you do. You probably got more than your share of them about Obama or McCain or Palin last fall. I even wrote about the phenomenon, and did a little research that indicated that Obama was the target of about six times as many false attacks as McCain in the accountability-free world of e-mail land.
I recently got another one of those screeds from one of my most reliable right-wing trolls, purporting to compare the "gaffes" of Obama's first 120 days with the record of one George W. Bush. You might have received this e-mail too. It's been posted repeatedly on right-wing websites and in online discussion forums the past week or two.
Well, apparently the editors of the Las Vegas Review-Journal don't get out much, or they don't have any right-wing friends, or they don't read right-wing political sites, because they just printed the very same comparison as a letter to the editor on Friday. Some local genius named Warren Willis Sr. did the old cut-and-paste thing and sent it almost verbatim to the R-J, and the paragons of journalistic virtue ran it as the top letter in Friday's editorial page.
I'm not even here to debate the content of the letter -- it points out some of Obama's inevitable and regrettable missteps, blows a few others out of proportion, but seems to endorse the idea that Bush's record of incompetence, corporate cronyism, fiscal malfeasance and utter disregard for the truth compares favorably to four months of Barack Obama in the White House.
My point is that either the R-J can't differentiate between a recycled e-mail rant and legitimate, original political criticism, or they didn't have anything better to run in its place. Either way, it's a sad statement on the journalistic ethics or competence of the R-J's editorial board and opinion page staff. Nice going, Sherm.
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