Citizen Tom

It could have been worse.  I might never have known.  Fortunately, an alert blogger (Ampersand) “exposed” Delegate Scott Lingamfelter’s effort to spread the following quote falsely attributed to Barack Obama. 

My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it. (from here)

It is amazing how many people pay attention to our public embarrassments — at least so it seems when we get caught.   And our first reaction is to dump the fool who put us into such an embarrassing situation.  However, I am certain most of us eventually realize the futility of doing that.  Otherwise, we would long ago have isolated ourselves from each other, and the human race would have ceased to reproduce and exist. 

So what is my excuse?  When I received Lingamfelter’s newsletter (see here), I noted the quote and laughed.  I merely thought Obama had misspoken.  Since it came from Lingamfelter, I figured he would know enough to check the quote.  I should have known better, but I got lazy.  I imagine Lingamfelter did too.  I imagine he too got the quote from someone he trusted to check it out.  That is how these silly things spread. 

So I did not check out the quote until I got this comment on my website.  In the process of checking out the quote, I turned up a really funny — and worrisome — article by Mark Steyn (Here it is on his website.).  In this article, Steyn explains how the fake quote took off and spread around the Internet.  While the Snopes article referenced by Ampersand is more popular, the article written by Steyn is definitely more informative.

Anyway, I appreciate the comment by Ampersand.  Thanks for correcting my oversight.