The e-mail was titled, "MESSAGE FROM PATTON'S GHOST." It was the usual right-wing thing.
In it Patton's ghost, as imagined by some random right-winger, tells Americans to get their heads out of their collective posterior because Muslims are on the loose: "If they manage to get their hands on a nuke, chemical agents, or even some anthrax, you'll will wish to God we had hunted them down and killed THEM while we had the chance."
And blah, blah, blah. I get such e-mails all the time, courtesy of right-wing readers who have added me to their mailing lists. (You shouldn't have. And I mean it.) As a general rule, they don't have a whole lot to do with reality. They're full of feel-good (if you're a conservative) "true stories" that tend to be uncritically accepted as gospel truth by the senders and the dozens of people they subsequently forward it to.
While people of all political persuasions forward things that resonate with them, the right-wing e-mail phenomenon has become so pervasive that The Nation magazine actually did a story on it, titled "Smear forward." In it, the magazine notes that e-mail, long an efficient way to disseminate information, has become a particularly effective way to disseminate
disinformation, false tales, smears that are often factually incorrect but serve a partisan purpose.
A case in point would be the tale, completely untrue, that Barack Obama attended an Islamic "madrassa" school as a child. The story became so pervasive — via e-mail — that mainstream news outlets picked up on it.
Another told of how Hillary flat-out refused to meet with mothers of sons and daughters who were killed in combat, a story that is also false. But not all involve candidates. A Web site titled My Right-Wing Dad.net" (
http://myrightwingdad.blogspot.com/), frequented by those whose right-wing relatives and friends regularly fill their in boxes, chronicles one popular missive in which actor Denzel Washington, so moved at the plight of injured soldiers, whips out his checkbook and pays for an entire new hotel where the soldiers families can stay while visiting them (untrue, though he did make a sizable donation).
Then there's just the stupid stuff, like the message titled "Can Muslims be Good Americans?" (answer: no), and one about how Budweiser "handled those who laughed at those who died on the 11th of September 2001"; some random Bud driver supposedly yanked all the company's products out of a store owned by gloating Arabs; Frito-Lay and Pepsi followed suit, and pretty soon the store was forced to close. Needless to say, however good this story may feel, it's not true.
"For conservatives," writes The Nation, "these e-mails neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The stories of the former's perfidy and the latter's heroism are, of course, never told by the liberal media. So it's left to the conservative underground to get the truth out."
Indeed, it's an imperative; virtually every one of these e-mails end with a plea — a command, really — to spread the word.
One wonders if, deep down, the conservatives who do this — mostly middle-aged to older, I'd guess, trusting in technology and thus the missives that are delivered via technology — ever wonder if it's all true. Deep down, I suspect some of them know that many of these tales are just a little too perfect, that they can't all be true.
But they so desperately want them to be. And I guess that's the next-best thing.
Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817. 
