The Internet is truly a wonderful resource. When reading an article by William F. Buckley, How Long, How Long? on Townhall.com I found the following statement:
“Bush vs. Kerry? Looking back on Bush vs. Gore, Professor Joseph Olson of the Hamline University School of Law in St. Paul, Minnesota, gives us a shrewd perspective. Adding up the counties in the U.S. won by the two candidates, it was Gore 677, Bush 2,434. Taking the population of those counties, it was 143 million for Bush, 127 million for Gore. In square miles of land won, Gore 580,000, Bush 2,427,000. The murder rate in Gore counties, 13.2 per 100,000 residents, contrasted with 2.1 in the Bush counties. “
I was so intrigued by these statistics I went to track them down. I found Professor Olson’s web site on which he bitterly complains about this quote:
DISCLAIMER: There is an e-mail floating around the internet dealing with the 2000 Bush/Gore election, remarks of a Scotish philosopher named Alexander Tyler, etc. Part of it is attributed to me. It is entirely BOGUS as to my authorship. I’ve been trying to kill it for 3 years. For details see: http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp.
The gist of the Snopes de-bunking is that Professor Olson never said it, the county voting statistics are correct, the murder rate statistics aren’t.
What a wonderful thing the Internet is! Even an amateur fact-checker like me can find out pretty easily what to believe and what not to believe.
Good post. I have also found a number of emails-not just virus alerts (“The virus has a teddybear icon with the name jdbgmgr.exe”), but prayer solicitations (Cindy, wife of a soldier, dying of cancer) or misleading claims (GWB paid for Sam Kettler’s funeral). It is both amusing and saddening how easily the truth can be tarnished or lost. It’s like that old game, Phone.
But how do we address this? What prodes or jars one to question a purported fact? Do we all have to run everything through snopes? Maybe this is where social networking software can really help.
I will be coming back to your blog. Thanks to DS for the tip. God bless.