Dueling Urban Legends: Obama vs. McCain

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Today, one of my coworkers--a nice girl with no particular interest in politics--received one of those Barack Obama "warning" emails. You know the ones, listing supposed things about Obama that the authors are concerned about. Trouble is, the points listed are either lies, half-truths, or at minimum deliberately misleading.

A quick perusal of Snopes.com, the leading urban legend debunking site, brings up many of these anti-Obama screeds. In fact, in their "hottest 25 legends," Obama comes up #1 with a bullet. Of the thirty or so Obama legends discussed there, only two are listed as true, and those have elements that distort the facts. The wingnuts who write these emails are so pervasive, Barack Obama himself has felt it necessary to create his own site, Fight the Smears, just to fight them.

I got to wondering, does John McCain have to worry about this stuff? So, I checked out Snopes.

It turns out, there are only four items on Snopes about McCain at the site, one untrue, one true and two undetermined. The untrue one is an false quote about his behavior during the war. But what I didn't find was long, bullet-pointed diatribes against McCain. I got nothing attacking his patriotism, nothing questioning his religion.

So, why the difference? It isn't as though McCain is beyond reproach. The difference seems to be that negative things said about McCain are most often true, and spoken out in the open, not in scurrilous, anonymous "concerned" emails. Could it be that liberals are less prone to sliming opponents with lies and distortions? Could it be that the truth is a more effective--or at least more honorable--weapon than lies? I guess we'll find out in November.