Posted 6:52 AM by Scoobie Davis

The American Right's Love Affair with Urban Legends
In the urban legends web site, Snopes, there is an update over the flap on supposed liberal over-permissiveness and John Walker Lindh. The upshot is that the American right has seized upon the fact that Lindh is from largely liberal Marin County, California; this has been used by right-wing pundits that liberalism leads to extreme sectarianism. National Review's Rich Lowry tried this ploy on the McLaughlin Group recently but was shot down by Eleanor Clift. The left needs to fight back again this type of smear. Whenever right commentators try to attribute Lindh's descent into nihilistic fanaticism to a liberal upbringing, pundits on the left should point out that the Tampa suicide pilot, Charles Bishop, was a member of the Young Republicans. Buzzflash did this, but few others on the left have used this counterpoint.

The right seems in love with urban legends--to the point of spreading these misrepresentations to millions--often intentionally. A case in point was the false rumor spread by the right-wing web site Newsmax (run by Christopher Ruddy, a Vince Foster conspiracy theorist) that Senator Hillary refused to meet with a group of mothers whose sons were killed in combat. Also, in my review of the late Barbara Olson's cut-and-paste hatchet job on the Clintons, The Final Days, I was the first to expose Olson's inclusion of a widely discredited urban legend:

Olson was intent on portraying every accusation against the
Clintons as established fact, even to the point of repeating urban legends.
Olson wrote: "Some even noticed that when Clinton was President,
Marine guards failed to execute a right face to stand facing his back as he
walked away. The Marines somehow relearned this maneuver on January
20, 2001, when the new Commander-in-Chief, President George W.
Bush, took office." This petty smear of President Clinton, debunked by
several urban legends web sites, is especially pernicious because it
besmirched the reputation of the guards, who have no dog in the fight.

Some people took issue with my taking on someone who can't defend herself. My defense of this criticism follows this logic: 1) What Olson wrote could not be defended by anyone, dead or alive; 2) It was not a personal attack but an attempt to correct misinformation that smeared both former President Clinton and the Marine guards; 3) Olson had no compunction against speaking ill of the dead: she once referred to Bill Clinton's dead mother as "a barfly who gets used by men." and 4) Olson had portrayed the book as an "insider's" view of the Clinton White House; the exposure of such untruths show that her insider role was not the case. Soon, in my columns section of this web site, I will publish a comprehensive list of urban legends spread by the right. Look for it.