August 26, 2013 08:26 AM UTC

We're Sick of Debunking the "Sickness On Our Souls"

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• by: Colorado Pols

FOX 31's Eli Stokols—seriously? This again?

[The Independence Institute’s Jon] Caldara blasted Morse, who faces a recall election next month for his support of gun control legislation, for a speech he gave on the Senate floor back in March when he attempted to quote a Robert F. Kennedy speech about violence given just weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

“This much is clear, violence breeds violence, repression breeds retaliation, and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our souls,” Morse said back in March.

He was talking about the scourge of violence — gun violence, specifically; but, in Caldara’s telling, Morse was “saying we gun owners, we have a sickness in our souls.”

Last month, media critic Jason Salzman called out Jon Caldara's blatant misquote of Senate President John Morse, completely distorting Morse's use of the words "a sickness on our souls" in a speech about the struggle to pass thus year's gun safety legislation. Morse was quoting a speech made by Robert Kennedy a few days after the assassination of Martin Luther King. In May, we debuted our irregular series "Today in BS" by exploring the twisting of this same quote into some kind of ad hominem remark against gun owners. There's just no truth to it.

So naturally, as Stokols continues, the fictional version is now being used in a TV spot attacking Morse.

The folks at Free Colorado, the group that staged a rally earlier this summer drawing more than 5,000 gun owners to Glendale for a magazine giveaway, aren’t too concerned with that context.

In a new minute-long ad set to hit the airwaves in Colorado Springs Sunday, a narrator uses snippets of Morse’s floor speech and then informs the audience that the lawmaker was saying that gun owners have the “sickness [in their] souls” — and that when he referred to the “toxicity” of gun violence he was actually talking about gun owners.

Of course, this isn't the first brazenly, even knowingly false claim that's ever been used in a political TV spot. But we and others in this space have spent enough time thoroughly debunking this particular claim that we're more than a little piqued to see it recycled yet again so close to the election. If this ad really is on the air in Colorado Springs, the grounds for demanding it be pulled are so clear it shouldn't even be necessary to ask.

And at this point, we're not accepting claims of ignorance. The people who made this ad know they are lying.

But we've reposted the original video of Sen. Morse's quote after the jump, just in case anybody is still "confused."