May 09, 2009 04:34 PM UTC

Please stop propagandizing my mother!

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• by: JeffcoBlue

I have really great parents who live in the southern part of Colorado Springs. I love my mom and dad very much, they’re good hardworking people who have earned the retirement Dad is just about to start. And they’re very sincere conservative Republicans.

Who get duped constantly by right-wing propaganda.

I can’t tell you how many times I have had to gently talk my mother down from these ridiculous emails she gets about President Obama. During the campaign, it seems like she received every single “Obama is a Muslim Trojan Horse” message that circulated, and there were hundreds. At first she would get these absurd emails and forward them immediately to all her friends with a breathless “can you believe this?” at the top. After being on the list of recipients for a few of these, I started calling Mom and giving her links to the various fact-checking websites (snopes, politifact, etc.) that debunked every single one of them–sometimes in ways that greatly embarrassed my mother after she forwarded these messages to all of her friends. My mother may not like Democrats but she really doesn’t like being lied to, or used to help spread a lie.

So Mom’s doing a little better with this now, though she still doesn’t like Obama she is screening the emails she gets at fact-checking websites herself, and calls me to debunk them herself now. I asked her if she takes her corrections back to the person who originally forwarded them to her, and she said “sometimes.” Presumably when she’s not going to hurt their feelings.

Unfortunately, she still finds herself duped once in awhile–like yesterday when she forwarded me this scanned syndicated column by Dale McFeatters of the Scripps News Service. It’s a few weeks old but that’s apparently how long these take to make their way around.

This really upset Mom. Not only did she email the article, she called to me tell me she had emailed it, and demanded I read it right there on the phone and respond.

So I did. With an email that I made her stay on the phone and read back to me.

Brief dialogue:

Mom: “But, but does that make it right?”

Me: “I dunno, Mom, did you complain about Bush’s entourage when he was President?”

Mom: “I’ve told you I don’t think Bush was much of a conservative.”

Me: “That’s not the question, Mom, did you complain about the size of the presidential entourage when Bush was president?”

Mom: “Well, no…”

Me: “But why?”

Mom: “Because he was–well–ok, maybe you have a point. But wouldn’t this columnist have been smart enough to realize this? Why didn’t he–this wasn’t a chain letter, it was in the paper!”

Me: “Evidently, Mom, it’s just as bogus.”

Mom: “That’s very surprising, but ok. When are you coming down to visit?”

The moral–please stop sending my mother this nonsense. It takes a lot of time for me to correct with her and we have much better things to talk about like her grandchild and the weather. And sometimes (like with this one) it really pisses me off to see my mom duped by liars, either the chain-letter or syndicated columnist variety, and I spend even more time going off about that. Really, Dale, how does it feel to brazenly mislead little old ladies? Does it make you proud?

/soapbox.