The e-mail rumor mill is run by conservatives

REUTERS - President Obama's birth certificate that was released by the White House on April 27, 2011, to try to quiet a debate within Republican circles that he was not born in the United States.

By Paul Farhi,
WashPost
Published: November 17

Will Medicare premiums go up nearly 2 1 / 2 times over the next two years in order to pay for the health-care legislation signed by President Obama last year? Well, no, they won’t. But you might think an increase is coming if you read a chain e-mail that has spread across the country in the past few months. “Send this to all seniors that you know,” it says. “So they will know who’s throwing them under the bus.”

Will Americans be subjected to international gun-control laws under a new U.N. treaty signed by Hillary Rodham Clinton? Is the president honoring Jane Fonda as one of the “women of the century”? Was suspected Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan an adviser to the Obama administration? Like the Medicare story, these claims are demonstrably false, too. Nevertheless, they are popular on the thriving underground e-mail circuit, a carnival of nonsense whose star attractions have included the canard that Obama is a secret Muslim and variations on the “birther” claims about his origins.

Grass-roots whisper campaigns such as these predate the invention of the “send” button, of course. No one needed a Facebook page or an e-mail account to spread the word about Thomas Jefferson’s secret love child or Grover Cleveland’s out-of-wedlock offspring (both won elections despite the stories, which in Jefferson’s case were very likely true).

(More here.)