Five Before Chaos

crossposted on Green Mountain Daily.

Those of you who live in the Northeast Kingdom of VT are indeed living in a beautiful place… lots of friendly people, beautiful scenery and other quintessential Vermont goodness. The one big drawback you have is that the newspaper is the Caledonian Record, whose rabid right-wing op-ed pages are, more often than not, so mind-numbingly short on logic, and chock full of double standards, compartmentalized thinking, xenophobia, false ‘patriotism’ and plain ol’ b.s. that they could pass for transcripts for right-wing talk radio…like this one I wrote about a while ago.

Anyways, an anonymous tipster led me to the revelation that not only are the editors of the C.R. op-ed severely intellectually challenged, they’re also incredibly lazy. You see, it seems like some of the material from their op-eds come from a rather unlikely source… those stupid right-wing spam emails that your crazy Republican uncle sends you. I’m not kidding. More below the fold…

You know those emails… usually containing something about God, lazy illegal brown people, terrorist brown people, Hillary Clinton Satanic lesbian conspiracies, etc. And as always, untrue. Well, it seems like the lazy hacks at the C.R., like most far-right ideologues, can’t be bothered to fact-check. Remember, their patron saint Reagan did say “facts are stupid things“. Here’s a few examples.

On Feb. 1st of this year, the C.R. ran an op-ed called “Not ‘Fonda’ Hanoi Jane”. Yeah, I know, you’ve undoubtedly seen it on a bumper sticker somewhere, usually next to a “Bush/Cheney” or “Charlton Heston is my President” sticker. Frightfully original, I know. Anyways, it was in regards to some Barbara Walters special where Jane Fonda was selected as one of the “100 Women of the Century”. The C.R. rants about Fonda’s well-known visit with the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War, but one passage stands out in particular:

“In one disgraceful traitorous act, Fonda went down a line of prisoners who secretly gave her scraps of paper with their identities on them to let their families know that they were alive. At the end of the line, she gave the papers to her North Vietnamese escort. Three of the men died from the beatings that followed this betrayal.”

Now, the lazy part. You’re probably familiar with Snopes.com, a site that is dedicated to debunking and confirming certain urban legends, rumours, etc. If you’re not, you should be. And Snopes spends a good amount of time dealing with those aforementioned right-wing spam email rumors. And in just five seconds, five seconds which the C.R. editors couldn’t be bothered to take to fact-check, because they’re too busy watching O’Reilly, Savage and Boortz and reading those crazy-uncle emails, Snopes set the record straight, and yes, it was one of those emails:

[The most serious accusations] that Fonda turned over slips of paper furtively given to her by American POW’s to the North Vietnamese and that several POW’s were beaten to death as a result, are untrue. Those named in the inflammatory e-mail have repeatedly and categorically denied the events they were supposedly a part of.

“It’s a figment of somebody’s imagination,” say Ret. Col. Larry Carrigan, one of the servicemen mentioned in the ’slips of paper’ incident. Carrigan was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967 and did spend time in a POW camp. He has no idea why the story was attributed to him, saying, “I never met Jane Fonda.” In 2005, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that Carrigan is “so tired of having to repeat that he wasn’t beaten after Fonda’s visit and that there were no beating deaths at the time that he won’t talk to the media anymore.”

Ridiculous? Yes. Surprised? Of course not. But wait, there’s more…

It’s pretty obvious that some on the far-right end of the spectrum are a bit short in the compassion department in regards to the whole Hurricane Katrina mess (might be that ‘lazy brown people’ thing). This one is about something that ‘crossed the desk’ of the op-ed staff at the C.R., in regards to understanding how large “a billion” really is.

• A billion seconds ago it was 1959.
• A billion minutes ago Jesus had recently died and Christianity was in its infancy.
• A billion hours ago our ancestors were living in the Stone Age.
• A billion days ago no one walked on the Earth on two feet.

Apparently one of them knows how to use a calculator because they then give a few examples of what one billion dollars could buy, such as 50,022 Subaru Outbacks and 43,478,260 seats at Fenway Park. They then point out how Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), is asking the Congress for $250 billion to help rebuild New Orleans, and then present us with these numbers:

• If you are one of the 484,674 residents of New Orleans (every man, woman, child), you each get $516,528.

• If you have one of the 188,251 homes in New Orleans, your home gets $1,329,787.

• Or, if you are a family of four, your family gets $2,066,012.

Wow, from destitute and poor to millionaire overnight! What a country! Well, wouldn’t you know that Snopes points out that exact same right-wing spam email with the same numbers, the only difference being the Snopes e-mail also has a witty comment at the end suggesting we should all flood our houses so we can be on the “big easy” street the rest of our lives, and the CR has a dig at the Senator about her love of earmarks. Ah, winger wit. Pathetic. And some of the math is wrong, I hear. Oh, and there are no plans to disperse over 2 million dollars to each family of four, either.

So what is it? Stupid and lazy? Low expectations from the readers or perhaps they take their readers for granted? I can see a typical morning in the pressroom, where C.R. “columnists” (and I say that with a very loose interpretation of the word), check their emails and whoever can come up with the biggest whopper gets a free donut. Either that or they just pull them off of Snopes, figuring that the readers that agree with them aren’t going to be bothered to check the facts anyways. I hear that their next op-ed involves something about how the face of the devil really was in the smoke when the Twin Towers fell, or how huge alligators live in the St. Johnsbury sewers, where they grow to enormous size after being flushed down the toilet by pet owners who think they’re getting too big.

So, if you’d like to give them a hand with their fine journalistic prowess, feel free to drop executive editor Dana Gray a line here with your tips, and also, why not drop publisher Mark M. Smith a line here and ask him why he thinks so lowly of the intelligence of the Northeast Kingdom residents he’s supposed to be informing. And remember, if it has something to do with Hillary Clinton eating babies or Barack Obama praying in a mosque and firing an AK47 into the air while screaming “death to the infidels!” as he helps illegal gay Mexicans sneak across the U.S. border, be ready to see an op-ed about it shortly. Heck, maybe you’ll get a job in the editorial room.

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